Taliban use “IEDs to try to undermine international willingness to stay the distance.”
Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced this month that the UK government would be investing an extra £150 million (€167.61 million, $240.17 million) in countering the improvised explosive device (IED) threat to military operations in Afghanistan. This will include an additional £10 million being put towards buying 400 hand-held mine detectors on top of the £12 million allocated earlier this year for new explosive disposal robots. There are now 30 of these in operation in Afghanistan.
Brown also outlined a package of longer-term investment in counter-IED capability, which will include setting up a new base in the UK for training and military operations intelligence in this area.
The prime minister added that he had agreed with President Karzai that Afghanistan would help troops on military operations to detect and dismantle IEDs.
This will include Afghan Armed Forces being trained to detect and disable IEDs, more local police on the ground and better intelligence from local people about the source of IED attacks.
Afghans will be encouraged not to harbor those planning explosive attacks on British soldiers, President Karzai assured the British prime minister.
Afghanistan's biggest problem, and that of the West doing something there, is President Karzai. This corrupt warlord, who the allies think can be manipulated to their ends, is what keeps and causes the people to support the Taliban, as is the case in many areas. President Karzai and his ilk, in fact, are the greatest obstacle to peace in Afghanistan.
Military Operations To Take Offensive
IEDs remain a huge threat to military operations as well as the lives of troops in Afghanistan. Explosives were responsible for the deaths of 124 of the 239 UK personnel killed in the conflict since it began in October 2001. Most of these were IEDs.
Senior figures from the British military, coalition countries and the UK's Ministry of Defence scientists and engineers met in July this year for a conference to discuss strategy and tactics in countering the IED threat during military operations.
"There has been an operational switch by the Taliban who are using IEDs to try to undermine international willingness to stay the distance to achieve our long-term objectives," noted vice-chief of the British defence staff General Sir Nicholas Houghton, at the briefing in July.
Military strategists said the tactic was to adopt an offensive stance in dealing with these threats. This means attacking the networks that produce and plant IEDs as well as developing protection against them.
Linking technology, training, tactics and procedures and intelligence will be key to undertaking military operations to unearth those who finance, create and conceal the bombs.
Furthermore, armed forces will analyse data gathered from recovered IED material and information from captured insurgents.
This, combined with surveillance records, will be used to build up an understanding of the process behind IEDs. It was agreed that the strategy for military operations must also be coordinated and integrated between coalition countries, whose communications networks must be able to talk to each other.
JIEDDO Specialist Teams
More recently, the US Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) has provided battalion-level units deployed in Afghanistan with specialised counter-IED teams through its Tidal Sun pilot training initiative.
This involves training select groups of war fighters in IED forensics and technical intelligence, with the initial phase of the pilot involving 40 soldiers and Marines grouped in two teams of five or six specialists.
"Our goal is to create teams of counter-IED experts, where the IED is their dedicated focus and not a peripheral task. They won't be pulling gate guard duty on the side," said Marine Corps Colonel CJ Mahoney, JIEDDO Joint Center of Excellence chief of staff.
The pilot has involved experts from the UK Canada and Australia as well as explosive investigation experts from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Ground Intelligence Center.
"What is unique about Tidal Sun is that it's a deliberate operation to bring together what we think are key analytical capabilities," added Command Sergeant Major Todd Burnett, JIEDDO's senior enlisted advisor.
"These teams will be able to pick up the pieces, find traces of explosive elements, find fingerprints and put their findings in a detailed analytical document," he continued.
They will examine "explosive signatures,” chemical traces and blast patterns to develop and overview of how an IED attack has unfolded. This information will then be analysed by the team and passed on to the relevant agencies for external study ahead of future military operations.
"We need to exploit all the information we can from an IED attack. Tidal Sun and the counter-IED teams enable us do that in a very robust, coherent and comprehensive way," Burnett concluded.
Without wishing to sound defeatist, the fact is that Afghanistan cannot be held and turned around into a western-style democracy. The forces of the British East India Company and later the British Army, the the Russians, have lost there.
Afghanistan is not Europe nor the USA nor even the Russia (or the former USSR). It is a tribal country where local warlords and others of that kind hold sway and democracy, the way it is being understood by the West will not work there.
The village councils are a sort and form of democracy but entirely different to the model that we are trying to impose on Afghanistan and because we are trying to impose something it is not going to work and our warriors are being killed.
A entirely different approach is required if we want to “pacify” Afghanistan.
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