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http://www.armytimes.com/news/2009/01/army_afghanoperations_011909w/
Afghanistan advance
General pushes winter offensive, economic boost to quell violence
By Michelle Tan - Staff writer
Posted : Saturday Jan 17, 2009 7:46:44 EST
BAGRAM, Afghanistan — The Army’s top commander for eastern Afghanistan predicts that his winter offensive against insurgents, along with boosted economic aid, will cut the rising violence and put the country on a faster track to stability.
“They don’t have to even attack us. We’re going to find them,” said Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of Regional Command-East and Combined Joint Task Force-101. “We’re prepared for winter operations.”
Schloesser also said RC-East will increase its Commander’s Emergency Response Program, or CERP, spending from $480 million in 2008 to $680 million this year for local projects, like improving water supplies.
“That development surge adds to a quality of life for the people, helps them link back to, ‘Hey, there is a future for my kids, and, oh, by the way, this government isn’t that bad,’” he said. “It also helps them say, ‘Wow, that’s a benefit of being part of this mission.’”
The goal is to set the conditions for the 82nd Airborne Division, which is slated to replace the 101st Airborne in Afghanistan in the middle of this year, Schloesser said.
“We believe that because we are going to work as hard as we are over the winter, aggressively with our security operations, our military operations … I don’t think you’re going to see a 40 percent increase [in violence] in our sector next year,” he said. “We’re going to reduce it by some amount.”
Meanwhile, troops in Afghanistan continue to fight a growing and increasingly complex insurgency, Schloesser said.
Soldiers in RC-East saw an 89 percent increase in kinetic activity in November and December 2008, compared with the same period in 2007, Capt. Christian Patterson, a spokesman for CJTF-101, wrote in an e-mail to Army Times.
“The increase can be attributed to our forces continuing to apply pressure on the insurgents in order to prevent them from harming the Afghan people and to diminish their ability to operate in the spring,” he said.
The harsh winters in Afghanistan typically have slowed down the insurgents, who use that time to reset and prepare for attacks in the spring, officials have said.
This winter, coalition forces have not decreased their offensive operations tempo, Patterson said.
“We are also covering more area,” he wrote. “The French are now operating in Kapisa Province and the Polish now have control of Ghazni Province.”
For example, U.S., coalition and Afghan forces are conducting Operation Lionheart in Nangarhar, Nuristan, Konar and Laghman provinces near Afghanistan’s northern border, Patterson said.
The troops also are conducting operations along the border with Pakistani military forces, he said.
“These efforts are intended to restrict the movement of insurgents between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he said. “It is having an effect, but it’s too early to measure in terms of metrics.”
Schloesser leads one of five regional commands in Afghanistan.
RC-East is about the size of Georgia and South Carolina combined, and it is home to the Hindu Kush, a vast series of mountains that cuts across the northern half of the regional command’s area of operations, and 450 miles of Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.
There are people from more than 400 tribes in the area, which includes Nuristan Province in the northeast, Bamyan Province in the middle, and Paktika Province in the southeast, with the primary ethnic groups being the Pashtuns, Tajiks and Hazaras.
“They’re proud of their ethnicity, they’re proud of where they came from, so that makes for a very complex area in which to be a soldier working out here,” Schloesser said.
In addition to the diverse group of people in RC-East, the soldiers also contend with a complex insurgency that no longer is predominantly Taliban, Schloesser said.
Networks such as Al-Qaida, Jalaluddin Haqqani, Let-Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and Tehrik Nefaz-e-Shariat Mohammadi all operate in RC-East.
“It is not the Taliban insurgency only we are fighting,” Schloesser said. “There’s far more to it. There are groups that are born and bred in our area. They are internal and there are external folks … who are really coming on down and they’re really fighting as well. The nature of the enemy got much more diverse.”
Some of the Kashmiri and foreign fighter groups also have collaborated with local fighters, increasing the locals’ capability, Schloesser said.
In January, Schloesser will get the first Army brigade combat team to be diverted to Afghanistan from its original mission in Iraq. More BCTs are expected to follow later in the year, but no decisions had been announced as of early January.
About 3,500 soldiers from 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, of Fort Drum, N.Y., will bolster the 21,600 American soldiers already serving in Afghanistan. The brigade should be operational in February, and Schloesser already has plans for them.
“They’re going to be able to work in the areas south of Kabul, in the Wardak and Loghar provinces, which is an area where we … have hardly any troops at all,” he said. “I’m also going to [take] part of a battalion and put it in the Konar area, which is what is right next to the border of Pakistan in the area north of Nangarhar. We haven’t had many troops out there.”
“It has become much more difficult for us here in Afghanistan because the relative safe haven has grown … [as well as] the ability of the enemy to go back and forth to rearm, recruit, get more money and then come back in and fight in Afghanistan,” Schloesser said.
The soldiers from 3rd BCT, 10th Mountain will move into existing forward operating bases and combat outposts. Those facilities have been or are being expanded to support the additional troops, Patterson said.
Commanders also expect an increase in kinetic activity as a result of the presence of these additional troops, Patterson said.
“The [brigade] will allow us the ability to hold more ground in order to open the way for more development opportunities in their area of operation,” he said.
The extra brigade will “go a long way in addressing the troop-civilian population issue that we have here,” Schloesser said. “It will not solve it by any means. It’s also critical as we go through all this that the Afghan National Army continues its really profound progress.”
In addition, the 10th Mountain brigade’s most recent deployment was in Afghanistan. The soldiers at the time were extended for three months and they returned in June 2007 after a 15-month deployment.
“They have a history here already,” Schloesser said.
Thousands more troops
The Pentagon is working on plans to send as many as 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. On Dec. 10, during a trip to Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Pentagon is moving to get three more brigades to the country by the summer.
As winter operations continue, Schloesser said that adding more power on the ground is not the only answer to stabilizing Afghanistan.
“To win in a decisive way over a shorter time rather than in generations, there’s going to need to be very significant economic development and there’s going to have to be a connection between the national government all the way down to the village level,” Schloesser said.
“Afghanistan is a poor country that doesn’t have incredible amounts of visible resources,” he said. “The natural resources that we see are in the ground and would require a lot of effort to get there, but they’re there, [such as] copper and iron ore, coal and things of that nature. It’s not that it has no future, it’s just going to require more than the military. It’s going to require, in my thought process, an interagency or international surge to be able to help economically. I think it can be done with more resources faster.”
Canadian Brig. Gen. Richard Blanchette, spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force, said RC-East and RC-South are the two most active and restive areas in the country.
“There is no point in thinking that we’ll be able to eliminate the last insurgents,” he said. “This would be a crazy idea. This is not the kind of war we’re in. This is a war against an insurgency and there’s only a political solution that can be brought to this kind of situation.”
Moving forward, Schloesser said he sees a lot of improvements in Afghanistan. The country has more than a thousand cell phone towers and more than 70 percent of the population owns cell phones, he said.
But there is still a lot to be done, he said, urging what he called “an interagency surge.”
“We need more specialists, more development specialists, more agricultural specialists,” he said. “We need more water, hydrology specialists. Those things are, in my mind, providing very necessary, hands-on skill sets to a country that is 80 percent agricultural.”
“We’re doing what I call a slow win,” he said. “A slow win means that my son is a captain [and] his kids will have to fight this rather than just [the two of us].”
Schloesser said: “I want to win this thing faster.”
Afghanistan advance
General pushes winter offensive, economic boost to quell violence
By Michelle Tan - Staff writer
Posted : Saturday Jan 17, 2009 7:46:44 EST
BAGRAM, Afghanistan — The Army’s top commander for eastern Afghanistan predicts that his winter offensive against insurgents, along with boosted economic aid, will cut the rising violence and put the country on a faster track to stability.
“They don’t have to even attack us. We’re going to find them,” said Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of Regional Command-East and Combined Joint Task Force-101. “We’re prepared for winter operations.”
Schloesser also said RC-East will increase its Commander’s Emergency Response Program, or CERP, spending from $480 million in 2008 to $680 million this year for local projects, like improving water supplies.
“That development surge adds to a quality of life for the people, helps them link back to, ‘Hey, there is a future for my kids, and, oh, by the way, this government isn’t that bad,’” he said. “It also helps them say, ‘Wow, that’s a benefit of being part of this mission.’”
The goal is to set the conditions for the 82nd Airborne Division, which is slated to replace the 101st Airborne in Afghanistan in the middle of this year, Schloesser said.
“We believe that because we are going to work as hard as we are over the winter, aggressively with our security operations, our military operations … I don’t think you’re going to see a 40 percent increase [in violence] in our sector next year,” he said. “We’re going to reduce it by some amount.”
Meanwhile, troops in Afghanistan continue to fight a growing and increasingly complex insurgency, Schloesser said.
Soldiers in RC-East saw an 89 percent increase in kinetic activity in November and December 2008, compared with the same period in 2007, Capt. Christian Patterson, a spokesman for CJTF-101, wrote in an e-mail to Army Times.
“The increase can be attributed to our forces continuing to apply pressure on the insurgents in order to prevent them from harming the Afghan people and to diminish their ability to operate in the spring,” he said.
The harsh winters in Afghanistan typically have slowed down the insurgents, who use that time to reset and prepare for attacks in the spring, officials have said.
This winter, coalition forces have not decreased their offensive operations tempo, Patterson said.
“We are also covering more area,” he wrote. “The French are now operating in Kapisa Province and the Polish now have control of Ghazni Province.”
For example, U.S., coalition and Afghan forces are conducting Operation Lionheart in Nangarhar, Nuristan, Konar and Laghman provinces near Afghanistan’s northern border, Patterson said.
The troops also are conducting operations along the border with Pakistani military forces, he said.
“These efforts are intended to restrict the movement of insurgents between Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he said. “It is having an effect, but it’s too early to measure in terms of metrics.”
Schloesser leads one of five regional commands in Afghanistan.
RC-East is about the size of Georgia and South Carolina combined, and it is home to the Hindu Kush, a vast series of mountains that cuts across the northern half of the regional command’s area of operations, and 450 miles of Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.
There are people from more than 400 tribes in the area, which includes Nuristan Province in the northeast, Bamyan Province in the middle, and Paktika Province in the southeast, with the primary ethnic groups being the Pashtuns, Tajiks and Hazaras.
“They’re proud of their ethnicity, they’re proud of where they came from, so that makes for a very complex area in which to be a soldier working out here,” Schloesser said.
In addition to the diverse group of people in RC-East, the soldiers also contend with a complex insurgency that no longer is predominantly Taliban, Schloesser said.
Networks such as Al-Qaida, Jalaluddin Haqqani, Let-Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and Tehrik Nefaz-e-Shariat Mohammadi all operate in RC-East.
“It is not the Taliban insurgency only we are fighting,” Schloesser said. “There’s far more to it. There are groups that are born and bred in our area. They are internal and there are external folks … who are really coming on down and they’re really fighting as well. The nature of the enemy got much more diverse.”
Some of the Kashmiri and foreign fighter groups also have collaborated with local fighters, increasing the locals’ capability, Schloesser said.
In January, Schloesser will get the first Army brigade combat team to be diverted to Afghanistan from its original mission in Iraq. More BCTs are expected to follow later in the year, but no decisions had been announced as of early January.
About 3,500 soldiers from 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, of Fort Drum, N.Y., will bolster the 21,600 American soldiers already serving in Afghanistan. The brigade should be operational in February, and Schloesser already has plans for them.
“They’re going to be able to work in the areas south of Kabul, in the Wardak and Loghar provinces, which is an area where we … have hardly any troops at all,” he said. “I’m also going to [take] part of a battalion and put it in the Konar area, which is what is right next to the border of Pakistan in the area north of Nangarhar. We haven’t had many troops out there.”
“It has become much more difficult for us here in Afghanistan because the relative safe haven has grown … [as well as] the ability of the enemy to go back and forth to rearm, recruit, get more money and then come back in and fight in Afghanistan,” Schloesser said.
The soldiers from 3rd BCT, 10th Mountain will move into existing forward operating bases and combat outposts. Those facilities have been or are being expanded to support the additional troops, Patterson said.
Commanders also expect an increase in kinetic activity as a result of the presence of these additional troops, Patterson said.
“The [brigade] will allow us the ability to hold more ground in order to open the way for more development opportunities in their area of operation,” he said.
The extra brigade will “go a long way in addressing the troop-civilian population issue that we have here,” Schloesser said. “It will not solve it by any means. It’s also critical as we go through all this that the Afghan National Army continues its really profound progress.”
In addition, the 10th Mountain brigade’s most recent deployment was in Afghanistan. The soldiers at the time were extended for three months and they returned in June 2007 after a 15-month deployment.
“They have a history here already,” Schloesser said.
Thousands more troops
The Pentagon is working on plans to send as many as 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. On Dec. 10, during a trip to Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Pentagon is moving to get three more brigades to the country by the summer.
As winter operations continue, Schloesser said that adding more power on the ground is not the only answer to stabilizing Afghanistan.
“To win in a decisive way over a shorter time rather than in generations, there’s going to need to be very significant economic development and there’s going to have to be a connection between the national government all the way down to the village level,” Schloesser said.
“Afghanistan is a poor country that doesn’t have incredible amounts of visible resources,” he said. “The natural resources that we see are in the ground and would require a lot of effort to get there, but they’re there, [such as] copper and iron ore, coal and things of that nature. It’s not that it has no future, it’s just going to require more than the military. It’s going to require, in my thought process, an interagency or international surge to be able to help economically. I think it can be done with more resources faster.”
Canadian Brig. Gen. Richard Blanchette, spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force, said RC-East and RC-South are the two most active and restive areas in the country.
“There is no point in thinking that we’ll be able to eliminate the last insurgents,” he said. “This would be a crazy idea. This is not the kind of war we’re in. This is a war against an insurgency and there’s only a political solution that can be brought to this kind of situation.”
Moving forward, Schloesser said he sees a lot of improvements in Afghanistan. The country has more than a thousand cell phone towers and more than 70 percent of the population owns cell phones, he said.
But there is still a lot to be done, he said, urging what he called “an interagency surge.”
“We need more specialists, more development specialists, more agricultural specialists,” he said. “We need more water, hydrology specialists. Those things are, in my mind, providing very necessary, hands-on skill sets to a country that is 80 percent agricultural.”
“We’re doing what I call a slow win,” he said. “A slow win means that my son is a captain [and] his kids will have to fight this rather than just [the two of us].”
Schloesser said: “I want to win this thing faster.”
