Naw Bahar District 2010–11: A case study of counterinsurgency Conducted by Naval Special Warfare in Afghanistan

Abstract

This article provides a critical analysis of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan at the tactical level. The efforts of several Naval Special Warfare detachments deployed to Naw Bahar district in Zabul Province, Afghanistan are examined in detail to identify key successes and failures in planning and execution. It defines the operating environment in which the detachments worked and identifies the goals and outcomes of the first and second phases of the counterinsurgency effort. The article concludes by placing the tactical effort in the context of the overall strategy in Afghanistan and suggests that time is the limiting factor to success.

Keywords::

• Afghanistan
• Counterinsurgency
• SEAL
• Zabul

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the contributions and sacrifice of the Pale Horsemen.

Notes

^1. See TRADOC, Counterinsurgency: US Army Field Manual 3-24 and Huslander and Spivey, ‘Village Stability Operations and Afghan Local Police’, 125–7. For the purposes of this article, ‘Governance’ shall include provision for essential services and the establishment of the rule of law; ‘Security’ shall include civil security operations and combat operations; and ‘Development’ shall include economic development and civil infrastructure improvement.

^2.Marlowe, ‘The Back of Beyond’.

^3. UC Davis, Afghan Agriculture.

^4. GIROA, Agroclimatic Situation of Afghanistan.

^5.Phillips, Learning a Hard History Lesson in ‘Talibanistan’.

^6.Sharan, Dynamics of Elite Networks.

^7. The traditional village shura is a meeting of the male village elders to discuss items of interest or to resolve inter-village conflicts. It derives from an Arabic word meaning ‘consultation’.

^8. Please see FM 3-05.20 for information related to a SFODA. Specifically, Chapter 3, page 28, section 3–116 states that, ‘The basic building block of SF operations is the 12-man SFODA (Figure 3–10, page 3–29), also known as an A detachment or A team. All other SF organizations are designed to command, control, and support the SFODA.’

^9. For information related to the use of HESCO barriers, please see http://www.hescobarriers.com/home.asp.

^10. As Ann Marlowe, ‘The Back of Beyond’, noted, ‘… the coalition base at Naw Bahar was commonly known as “FOB Nowhere.”’ NSW kept this unofficial name, but officially the base was Fire Base Naw Bahar. After the implementation of VSO, it was renamed Village Stability Platform (VSP) Naw Bahar.

^11. Jingle trucks were described by Charlie Moore, CNN Senior Producer as follows; ‘Jingle trucks are flat-bed vehicles about the size of a U-Haul truck, painted with intricate patterns and bright colors. They get their name from the thousands of chimes that dangle and ring from base of the vehicle whenever it moves.’ Charlie Moore, ‘The Hidden Dangers of Jingle Trucks,’ CNN Blog (12 September 2006), http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/2006/09/hidden-dangers-of-jingle-trucks.html (accessed 24 April 2013).

^12.Afsar et al., The Taliban: An Organizational Analysis, 65–6.

^13.Nijssen, The Taliban's Shadow Government in Afghanistan.

^14.Himmat, Nawa District Retaken.

^15.Marlowe, ‘The Back of Beyond’.

^16. The spelling of all tribal names is consistent with the Provincial Overview of Zabul Province found at the Naval Post Graduate School's Program for Culture and Conflict Studies website, http://www.nps.edu/Programs/CCS/Zabul.html (accessed 25 April 2013).

^17.Nijssen, The Taliban's Shadow Government in Afghanistan.

^18. Two articles from the Small Wars Journal expand on the loss of tribal leadership through war: Saum-Manning, ‘VSO/ALP Comparing the Past and Current Challenges to Afghan Local Defense’ and Hanlin, ‘One Team's Approach to Village Stability Operations’.

^19. For the purposes of this article and to make comparison easier, governance, security, and development will be the dependent variables. Therefore, information operations, civil security operations, host nation security forces, essential services, governance, and economic development as identified by FM 3-24 will be grouped together with their VSO counterparts.

^20.McChrystal, Commander's Initial Assessment, 1–3.

^21. FM 3-24, chapter 5–38. ‘Insurgents use unlawful violence to weaken the HN government, intimidate people into passive or active support, and murder those who oppose the insurgency. Measured combat operations are always required to address insurgents who cannot be co-opted into operating inside the rule of law. These operations may sometimes require overwhelming force and the killing of fanatic insurgents. However, COIN is “war amongst the people.”’

^22. For more information on development money and its effects on the Afghan economy, please see the following; Cusack et al., Bactrian Gold, 11.

^23.Himmat, Nawa District Retaken.

^24. TRADOC, Counterinsurgency: US Army Field Manual 3-24.

^25. See the following; Saum-Manning, ‘VSO/ALP Comparing the Past and Current Challenges to Afghan Local Defense’, Hanlin, ‘One Team's Approach to Village Stability Operations’, and Huslander and Spivey, ‘Village Stability Operations and Afghan Local Police’.

^26. Arrenguin-Toft, ‘How the Weak Win Wars’, 100.

^27. The following offer studies of asymmetric warfare, but in varying degrees all use the survival of the supported government as the metric of strategic success; Arreguin-Toft, ‘How the Weak win Wars’, Paul, Clarke, and Grill, Victory has a Thousand Fathers, and Watts, Baxter, Dunigan, and Rizzi, The Uses and Limits of Small-scale Military Interventions.

^28. Arrenguin-Toft, ‘How the Weak Win Wars’, 97.

^29.Paul and Clarke, ‘Counterinsurgency Worldwide’, 127.

^30. Watts et al., The Uses and Limitations of Small-Scale Military Interventions, 34.

^31. Arrenguin-Toft, ‘How the Weak Win Wars’, 111.

^32. Ibid., 121.