STAY STRONG BOSTON FROM AFGHANISTAN

An awesome picture from Afghanistan -  Thanks to these Soldiers for their service and their solidarity with the people of Boston

Thank you Chicago Tribune

And NYC and all those around our world who have stood with Boston - Thank You. 

Boston will be what it has always been, a beacon of Freedom to all.

These cowards have messed with the wrong city.

Prayers for all in Boston

Boston.  My city and where I call home has joined the list of cities that are a victim of terrorism.
 
I woke up early this morning in Kandahar to the news that my home city had been bombed by unknown terrorists. No one knows who did this but they will be found and brought to justice.

The words of Sir Winston Churchill come to mind and they are how I feel at this moment.

" We ask no favours of the enemy. We seek from them no compunction. On the contrary, if tonight our people were asked to cast their vote whether a convention should be entered into to stop the bombing of cities, the overwhelming majority would cry, "No, we will mete out to them the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted out to us." The people with one voice would say: "You have committed every crime under the sun. Where you have been the least resisted there you have been the most brutal. It was you who began the indiscriminate bombing. We will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do your worst - and we will do our best."

‘In October, when we destroyed the Taliban sanctuary, I didn’t get anyone at my door complaining.’

The saying that " We had to destroy the village to save it.." came out of the Vietnam War and was falsely attributed to an Army officer but was in reality, a fabrication of a reporter. It was never really said by any military member.

In Afghanistan, an Army Officer found himself faced with the same situation but with a different twist.

The Villages in question had long been evacuated by the residents, were rigged with explosives and were watched to ensure that the only people there were Taliban. It still created a serious issue for a dedicated officer who would rather build up than tear down. I agree with his contention that if he had to do it all over again, Lt. Col. David Flynn says he would still have destroyed the buildings, because he sees little alternative.

He works to help the Afghans, and by doing so, earns their respect even in the midst of a war. This is something that separates what the Americans and our Allies have accomplished that the Russians were unable to do.

Like many issues in a War, it is all too easy for those in the rear to second guess those up at the "tip of the spear"....I find that try to second guess these issues to be both foolish and lacking common sense.

If you want to do the job, get off your arse and join the fight. Otherwise, leave the fight to those on the battlefield who are close enough to feel the actual "heat" of battle on their face.


Why I Flattened Three Afghan Villages

By Spencer Ackerman - The Guardian - UK

When the day began for Lt. Col. David Flynn on Oct. 6, Taliban insurgents were using three southern Afghanistan hamlets as bomb factories. By the time the next day ended, Tarok Kolache, Khosrow Sofla and Lower Babur had been eradicated from the valley where they once stood.

Flynn had ordered tens of thousands of pounds of bombs to rain down on the villages. Tarok Kolache was completely flattened, and there wasn’t much left of the other two.

Flynn says that he had little choice but to take the extreme step. The Taliban had rigged bombs all through the compounds in the villages, and placed tons of explosives in the vegetated fields nearby.

Efforts at clearing the villages of homemade bombs during the previous three months had failed. The fighters had evicted the villagers from their land, telling them, “you can’t get to the fields this year,” in preparation for the U.S. troop surge. Few residents still retained hope that they’d ever get to move back home.

“We never went in with the mindset that we’re going to flatten the villages,” Flynn tells Danger Room. “I have friends in this community now. The last thing I’m trying to do is wreck my friends’ lives.”

‘We didn’t show them a plan and say, “We’re going to destroy everything in the village, is everyone OK with that?”‘

But he did flatten the villages — a decision that’s spurred heated debate since an analyst close to Gen. David Petraeus, Paula Broadwell, blogged earlier this month about the destruction of Tarok Kolache with 49,200 lbs. of rockets and bombs.

Flynn discloses that it wasn’t just Tarok Kolache that got hit: Khosrow Sofla and Lower Babur, located nearby in the Arghandab River Valley, were pounded nearly as badly. Several buildings in Khosrow Sofla are still standing, Flynn says, but Lower Babur is “closer to Tarok Kolache, though not completely eliminated.”

Now, the villages are being rebuilt, a process that’s just begun and which probably won’t be finished by the time Flynn’s battalion completes its tour in the spring. It remains to be seen whether Afghans will remember Flynn for taking the villages back from the Taliban — or completing the process of their destruction.


It wasn’t Flynn’s first time in southern Afghanistan. A Massachusetts native, he served a previous tour at the nearby Kandahar Airfield in 2004 and 2005, when there wasn’t much of either a fight or an American presence. He read Lester Grau’s acclaimed history of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, in part to learn what not to do.

Driving through the Arghandab back then and seeing its thick vegetation — perfect for hiding bombs — he recalls thinking, “Holy crap, what must the Russians have gone through…. I was thinking thinking back then, I’m glad we weren’t in that kind of fight. And now, seven years later, here I was.”

That factored into his mind heavily in 2010, when he learned his battalion and their Afghan partners, known collectively as Combined Joint Task Force 1-320, would be one of the first surge troops to clear out parts of Kandahar. But it was one thing to visualize the insurgents’ improvised explosive device (IED) tactics — and another to experience them.

“I didn’t anticipate the density of IEDs that we saw,” he says. From July to October, the 1-320th fought its way through an area about 2 kilometers long and 6 kilometers wide — and found 200 improvised explosive devices. Later, his men would discover caches of another 200 Taliban bombs. “There was an IED about every 60 meters [200 feet] that you’re out there walking,” he says, “in the gardens, on the roads, in the walls, in the villages, in the buildings.”

And it felt like it. Flynn’s plan was to push south and east to the Arghandab River, through villages the Taliban had controlled for three years. The insurgents had planted an ungodly number of bombs in the interim.

The 1-320th’s first real test came July 30, at a canal crossing it needed to control if it was to gain access to those villages. The fight, which the unit christened the Battle of Bakersfield, took four days. “We had three killed the first day and eight wounded,” Flynn says, “and we lost another 12 wounded during the next couple days of fighting.”

What he didn’t see also stuck with him: people. “The friendlies dispersed. They went to the four winds,” Flynn says. The Taliban had pushed the populace out, away from the pomegranate trees that provided their livelihood. Some went to Kabul, others to Kandahar, figuring that the area’s history of never falling to a foreign power meant the Taliban was here to stay. Others — including Tarok Kolache’s malek, or de facto leader — went to a village near Flynn’s base called Jelawar.

‘In October, when we destroyed the Taliban sanctuary, I didn’t get anyone at my door complaining.’
Those displaced locals became a source of information for Flynn that summer. He wouldn’t have known how densely placed the homemade bombs were without them.

Before a planned raid into Lower Babur with Special Forces and Afghan commandos, “people literally came up to us and said we can’t go back there. We were with the police on a partnered operation, and they literally told the police, ‘Don’t go down into the gardens, there are Taliban IEDs [there].’ Go where it’s wet, not where it’s dry, if you have to go.”

Using drones and what he calls “multiple sensors,” Flynn confirmed that the Taliban had turned the compounds in the vacated villages into bomb factories. “Pattern of life” analysis showed militants coming in and out, but no civilian activity. In some cases, he could see homemade explosives drying on the rooftops. When he did, he’d call in an air strike or a blast from an attack helicopter, leveling the building.

But as the months ground on, that didn’t stop the proliferation of the bombs. All in all, the 1-320th suffered seven killed and 83 wounded, with nearly 70 percent of those casualties coming from homemade bombs and mines.

To clarify something from Broadwell’s post, Flynn sent his men into the villages to attempt to clear them out — but there were just too many bombs. A July raid on Khosrow Sofla was repulsed by the density of the explosive charges. A Special Forces sergeant told Flynn it was the “most sophisticated IED network he had ever seen.”

A different clearing operation had to be turned back after his men discovered there were more bombs than they had material with which to safely detonate them.

That led Flynn to seek out alternatives. “It was comforting to know” that the civilians had fled, because “we [could] employ the full suite of our weapons systems” — everything from grenades to .50-cal machine guns to attack helicopters and close air support — “without worrying about killing civilians.”

The alternatives before him were stark: He could take out the buildings. Or he could keep moving in on foot, with more of his men getting maimed or killed. And if he cleared the villages without taking out the buildings, he couldn’t know that Afghans would be safe moving back into them, since the Taliban had rigged them to detonate.

So by late September, Flynn called together Tarok Kolache’s malek and the other area residents to let them know that he was planning, essentially, large-scale demolitions. “We didn’t show them a plan and say, ‘We’re going to destroy everything in the village, is everyone OK with that?’” he says.

“But they were made aware there would be significant collateral damage in the village. People didn’t say, ‘Yeah, blow up the village,’ but they kind of understood — they’d been at war for 30 years. This was the biggest fight that had gone on in the district.”

A reporter from the Daily Mail, who Flynn says wasn’t at the meeting, reported that Flynn threatened them: Either turn in the homemade bombs, or he’d blow up their houses.

Flynn says that never happened: Instead, he told them that if residents couldn’t tell him where exactly the bombs were, he would have no way of disposing of them without blowing up the buildings. Khosrow Sofla’s malek registered the only concern, Flynn says: He wanted the soldiers to use a bulldozer to get rid of the bombs, so the pomegranate trees wouldn’t be harmed.1

On October 6, once Flynn was satisfied he had sufficient intelligence about which buildings had explosives in them and the area was cleared of civilians, the air campaign began. Tarok Kolache got 49,200 pounds of bombs dropped on it — basically, 25 1-ton-pound bombs to take out “over 45″ buildings.

Flynn says he’s not sure how much Khasrow Sofla and Lower Babur got, but says it was comparable.

He reported his plan up to brigade headquarters, and from there it went to the regional commander, Flynn believes the sprawling office running the day-to-day war from Kabul, known as the ISAF Joint Command, knew of it as well.

During the bombing, Flynn kept an eye out for civilians and saw none. “We had overhead drones watching the strikes, multiple sensors watching the strikes,” he says. “We probably even got film somewhere, because we were anticipating the Taliban coming out and saying something.”

On previous operations, “a long line of elders” would complain if a civilian died. “In October, when we destroyed the Taliban sanctuary, I didn’t get anyone at my door complaining,” he says.

But that may not be enough. Some locals have expressed dissatisfaction with the operation: Even an Afghan cop told an NPR reporter in Tarok Kolache on Monday that he was “very disappointed and very angry” that the village is no more.

Flynn says his strategy will be vindicated when the battalion stays in the valley — he’s set up 17 small bases for the 38 villages he patrols — and rebuilds what it destroyed. “I told them, ‘We can rebuild your homes. I can’t give you your leg back, I can’t give you your life back,’” –the consequence of Afghans returned to booby-trapped houses — “but I promise, I will rebuild the homes.”

The building is just getting underway, including the foundation of Tarok Kolache’s new mosque. But problems remain in the Arghandab. While the Taliban appear to have largely left the district for nearby areas after the October clearing operations (Flynn estimates there are still a dozen active militants in the area) the battalion is still “pulling out [homemade bombs] by the dozens.”

And just last week, the Taliban assassinated Khosrow Sofla’s malek. Some Afghans tell Flynn they’re too scared to move back into buildings that the battalion left standing. There’s USAID program to re-plant 4,000 pomegranate trees, but that’s “still not a great deal for the people, because that tree’s gonna take five years to produce any fruit.”

If he had to do it all over again, Flynn says he would still have destroyed the buildings, because he sees little alternative. But he wouldn’t have released the before-and-after pictures to Broadwell, because they seemed to imply that Flynn thought flattening the village was sufficient. On the other hand, he says, the pictures show “the truth. That should tell you I’m not trying to hide anything or be deceitful.”

Flynn is home at Fort Campbell on R&R before finishing up his tour. He says he can already take “a degree of satisfaction” in rereading Grau and comparing his actions to the Russians.

“We’re not there to terrorize the population,” he says. “The people talk about the Russians bombing their villages and say the Russians never did anything for us. They say, ‘That’s the difference between you and the Russians.”

Note 1. The original version of this story confused the malek of Khosrow Sofla with the malek of Tarok Kolache at the late September meeting.

GO HEAVY or GO HOME.....

It seems that the people in the 5 sided wind tunnel on the Potomac are taking the AFGHN thingee seriously.....They must have reviewed the "Leadership law of Battle"

Leadership Law of Battle

If it was risky, it worked and no one got hurt: you were brilliant
If it was risky, it worked and someone got hurt; you were courageous
If it was risky, it didn't work and no one got hurt; you were lucky
If it was risky, it didn't work and someone got hurt; you were stupid (and probably dead)

All fighting in AFGHANISTAN has been risky...the issue has been what were we going do to prove that we were taking the threat of the idjits amassed on the AFGHN/PAK border areas who have been making lots of noise. Europe was recently the center of increased threats for serious terrorist activity...add into that the the DEMS need POTUS to act decisively to show that they are able to handle the larger threats, and it all adds up to " GO HEAVY or GO HOME"

In military or police operations, the rules of engagement (ROE) determine when, where, and how force shall be used. Such rules are both general and specific, and there have been large variations between cultures throughout history. The rules may be made public...

It seems that in this case, the Warfighters are GOING HEAVY on a specific area of AFGHN and doing so to take out a source of support for the Taliban. I hope they are highly successful and are able to inflict some serious damage to the Taliban......They didn't want to have the mission on TV and are likely fighting this battle as war should be fought, ruthlessly and to WIN. About frickin' time.... I have seen the effort that troops have put in, it is about time that the Generals allow the troops to take the fight into the hills with the full force of our heavy bombers to find the Taliban and knock them dead in their tracks.

Journalist Embeds Canceled In Afghanistan
by Ben Gilbert
October 18, 2010

KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan – A major military operation involving hundreds of American troops, U.S. Special Forces and heavy bombers dropping 2,000-pound bombs on Taliban command and control centers wrapped up last week, concluding a critical phase in the campaign to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan's southern Kandahar province.
But no journalists were there to witness the operation.

U.S. military officials told journalists who had arrived to Kandahar Airfield for embeds in the Arghandab district between Oct. 1 and Oct. 15 that logistical problems had caused their embeds to be canceled.

Maj. Randy Taylor, head of the Media Support Center at Kandahar Airfield, said the canceled embeds were not an attempt by the military to limit media coverage of the war in the Arghandab district, long advertised by the U.S. military as one of three key objectives of this summer and fall's campaign in Kandahar province.

"[Task Force] Raider has had a capacity issue related to being able to house all the journalists who wanted to embed within their AO (Area of Operations)," Taylor said in an email. Task Force Raider is the name of the group of combat units responsible for the Arghandab district.

The New York Times, Agence France Presse, the military's independent Stars and Stripes newspaper, Swedish Radio and several other freelance photographers and reporters were among the embeds canceled or changed just hours or moments before they were scheduled to join U.S. military units in Arghandab district.

The operation was one part of a new push that began in September into the rural areas west of Kandahar City, which includes Arghandab, Zhari and Panjwai districts. All are traditional strongholds for the Taliban, who have long controlled parts of the region and whose fighters used the area as a kind of highway for movement of personnel and supplies.

A senior coalition official in southern Afghanistan, who asked his name not be used, said the offensive focused on the northwestern part of Arghandab district and, specifically, a village called Charqol Bah.The official described the village as a "command and control headquarters" for the Taliban.

The Arghandab River splits the farms and dense pomegranate groves of Arghandab district into two halves: east and west. U.S. forces based on the violent western side of the district during the last year have been hammered by near constant attacks on American bases. Improvised explosive devices have killed or maimed dozens of U.S. troops since they arrived last summer to help bolster the small Canadian force that had been responsible for Kandahar Province over the last four years.

This summer, one newly-arrived platoon of American soldiers to Arghandab district was declared combat ineffective in less than a month after losing eight men out of 17.
Last week’s operation focused on destroying the areas in western Arghandab district from which the Taliban mounted those attacks, regrouped, slept and built bombs.

The coalition official said the operation was "big army" in the classic sense. Artillery and other heavy weapons were employed, including bombers to drop thousands of pounds of explosives on bomb-making factories and other Taliban infrastructure. Long strings of explosives attached to rockets, called MICLICs, were used to clear mine-laden fields so troops could advance. Booby-trapped houses and compounds were also destroyed.

The official said U.S. and Afghan troops killed and detained dozens of Taliban fighters.
"The Taliban took a scrubbing," he said.

A reporter embedded at an American base just over a chain of jagged mountains dividing the Arghandab district from Kandahar City said he saw attack helicopters flying overhead and at night saw what he thought were signs of explosions in the Arghandab Valley.

"Between the mountains I could see the sky light up," said Richard Myrenberg of Swedish Radio.

Officials are calling the operation a success — a claim difficult to confirm since no journalists were there to witness it.

The day after the operation ended, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, U.S.-led coalition commander Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry visited the Arghandab District Center, where the district government is located, alongside U.S. and Afghan military bases. They met with district officials and elders from the area.

The trip was touted as Karzai's first visit to a district outside Kandahar City since becoming president in 2004.
"Arghandab is in a much better state than it was just six weeks ago," said British Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, commander of all troops in the coalition's Regional Command – South, which includes Arghandab district in Kandahar province.

Carter said the military operation was complimented by a focus on strengthening the local governing capacity of the Arghandab district. He said the district governor and a new police chief are more representative of the Arghandab’s tribal make-up and are proving successful at attempts to reach out to the district’s inhabitants in an effort to improve security.

"When you combine that with the need to conduct one or two clearing operations that took place over the last two calendar weeks, what you find in Arghandab is a more positive environment," he said.
Carter said several indicators pointed toward Kandahar province improving in terms of security.

"In Arghandab now, it is easier for the district governor to go to the west bank of the Arghandab and to go to villages he wasn't able to go to before by himself, without protection," he said.
He also said travel on the key highway in the province is much safer than just a few months ago.

Carter acknowledged that the alleged success of the Arghandab district operation doesn't mean the Taliban is beaten. The third phase of the Kandahar campaign, involving clearing areas in Zhari and Panjwai districts, called Operation Dragon Strike, is now underway and troops have faced stiff Taliban resistance in places.
Assassinations and other attacks have also plagued Kandahar City in recent weeks.

Saturday night a bomb killed one person and injured four near the police headquarters in Kandahar city. Two weeks ago at least nine people died in two separate bomb attacks near police stations. The same week, the vice mayor of Kandahar city was gunned down outside his office in one of the city's more secure neighborhoods.

This summer was also the most violent since the war began, with more coalition combat deaths in June than any other month of the conflict since the U.S.-led invasion began almost nine years ago. With two months still left in the year, 2010 will go down as the most violent year of the war in Afghanistan so far. In the last week alone, 18 American troops have been killed across the country.

Coalition officials compare the increased casualties to the uptick in violence that accompanied the surge of U.S. troops in Iraq in 2008. Petraeus, commander of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, has long warned that the Afghan war would turn more violent before positive results of the surge would be seen.

Any positive developments this fall must also be measured against the fact that violence dips as the warm "fighting season" summer months change to the cooler fall climate, when snow and freezing temperatures are found along the Afghan border with Pakistan. The spring and summer months have been the most violent in Afghanistan since the war began in 2002