Looking Back

As I mentioned in my last post, my forth deployment has come to an end after a little more than a year. After spending well over a week conducting a handover with my replacement I left NKAIA, Kabul and flew to Kuwait; which, as usual, was boring, too warm, and as close to purgatory as I think one can experience in this plane of existence.

I then spent a day and a half at Camp Atterbury, Indiana turning in equipment and doing lots of sleeping. From there I flew to central Virginia and began my inprocessing with my program at NGIC. It was frustrating at first because after a year all I wanted to do was take some time off where I wasn't stuck on some base and had the freedom to get away. Of course, after all my previous deployments I had to sit in either Kuwait or some other base for several days before going home and then do all the annoying redeployment stuff that the Army requires. This time just felt more irritating, especially when I was in Virginia and didn't have anything to do but couldn't leave work because "you still need to put in your 8 hours."

Ok, I'll just sit here and stare at the wall then.

Sitting in Kuwait as usual gave me too much time to look back and think on the deployment. It felt a bit like at the end of my third deployment. The mission felt incomplete; I think this is because I didn't leave with a unit. As a contractor on my own time schedule I was the continuity between the deployments of V Corps and III Corps as they took over ISAF Joint Command. III Corps still has a few more months to go and it kind of felt like I was abandoning them.

There was also a lot of frustration in the lack of success I had with my jackal targets (the insider threat target set). I did everything I could within my lane and capabilities and in that sense I was successful. However, in terms of removing the individuals from the battlefield, there wasn't much progress.

But that's the nature of deploying in support of counterinsurgency operations. You're not going to fix everything, put all the puzzle pieces together, or get all the targets. One of these days I'll remember that.

I'm Going To Get Myself In Trouble

You may recall that for some baffling reason I've been allowed to name the objective names for one of ISAF Joint Command's target sets. That target set happens to be the insider attackers (also known as green on blue shooters) who have escaped after conducting their attack. I've had a maddingly good time naming these assholes and I have to supress my giggling when a few of them are mentioned in a meeting. I can also see that others often have to supress their own giggling. It brings a bit of joy and humor in this frustrating and stressful headquarters.

Yesterday I was sitting in an update to IJC's officer in charge of intelligence (a 1 star general) on this current target set when at the end he asks about Fuzzy Jackal and who named him. My boss laughed a bit and then indicated that I was the one who named a majority of the individuals on the target set. For a moment I thought I was going to get lectured about professionalism but luckily for me I think the general is just as amused by the objective names as the rest of us.

However, there is a bit more to the story, as there usually is. For some odd reason, a majority of the insider attack perpetrators...and potential perpetrators for that matter...come from one province. The insider attacks are an Afghan wide problem but for reasons unknown to me at this time, this particular province breeds individuals who join the security forces and eventually conduct an attack more than any other province.

So the general tasked us with developing and targeting the network in this province. He mentioned that since 60% of the attackers come from this province we need to go after the facilitation network. Where did that 60% figure come from? An off-hand comment that I made a couple of days prior to a colonel when he asked how many of the attackers come from this province. I made a quick "ball park" guess based off what I was seeing in the reporting. Now my SWAG (scientific wild assed guess) is being quoted by general officers. Shit...I really need to learn to keep my mouth shut. Luckily I'm pretty sure that 60% number is somewhat accurate.

The general also tasked us with naming this network so it gets some attention. A colonel quickly spoke up and said...

"Mike is not allowed to name the network."

Damn, fun times are over.

X-Files: Kabul?

Remember during my last deployment to Iraq how 1-14 Cav had some strange shit flying around COP Cobra and nearly shot down a national level aerial asset? No? Well here's the link so you can catch up. I bring this up because I had assumed that when I came to ISAF Joint Command I'd probably never look up to the night sky and say, "what the hell is that?!"

I was wrong.

This story is not quite as interesting as my Diyala UFO story but it's slightly weird nonetheless. It occured last night as I was walking home. A plane was coming in to land and as I watched it something caught my eye. Looking up I saw three, very bright, very orange, stars in the shape of a triangle (I am aware that any 3 points are going to look like a triangle). After about a second the stars/lights/whatever were gone. My first thought was that they were flares.

But flares don't burn away that fast. They were way too high to be flares anyway. What about the landing plane? If it had shot off flares they would have been behind the aircraft. These were in front of and waaaaaaaaaaaaay above. Another plane? I didn't see anything else in the sky.

Perhaps it was the blimp that floats over the Green Zone/US Embassy/ISAF HQ? Nope, the blimp was blinking its standard lights and was pretty low to the ground from my perspective.

The hell did I see?

Like I said, not as interesting but still strange.

But back to the Diyala story...I now have more to add. A college buddy of mine found himself here at NKAIA for a couple of days about two weeks ago. I just happened to tell my "UFO's flying over my combat outpost" story and he gives me a funny look. Apparently he had been talking to someone awhile back to was in Iraq at USF-I HQ around late 2009. This individual told my friend the story of some trigger happy jackasses on a patrol base who tried to shoot down a US aircraft.

Hell yeah, I'm one of those jackasses. Perhaps trying to shoot down US aircraft is why we had so much trouble getting collection assets...

Damnit Special Forces, Help A Brother Out

This should be easy, apparently it is not

The past week or so has been full of ups and downs. Here's a general run down of how things are going from the perspective of my little corner of the universe:

- LA Kings win. Yaaaaaah!

- I get sick. Booooo (It's either malaria or a bad head cold, I can't tell...)

- I got promoted! Double yaaaaaaaaah!

- Special Forces won't action (kill) the target I want them to. Booo

- Special Forces will action my target because I got someone to ask nice like. Yeeaaahh!!!

- Kings win their playoff series! HEAD EXPLODE YEEAAAAAAAH!!!

- Special Forces giving excuses for not actioning target. WTF boo.

Without going into too much detail, ISAF Joint Command does not have an action arm. We're a headquarters, not a battle space owner. The assets we have are tasked down to other organizations. The organization we typically use to action an operational level target is the special forces guys. It's not usually a problem.

For some reason we're getting a weird push back from the SF guys for a particular target we are trying to eliminate. 3 weeks ago they were all about giving this target a hellfire present but all of a sudden they are saying IJC should use it's own action arm to target the guy. Umm, what?

It's a real odd feeling for me to be pushing this much to try to get someone killed. I feel like my karma is going to be all fucked up for it. Ugh, enough of this frustration; here's a picture of a kitten to make me feel better:

This little guy would kill my target for me...kill him with cuteness!

Fighting Season, Woot!

The Taliban has finally bothered to announce the beginning of 2013's Fighting Season/Spring Offensive. About time guys, I was getting worried; and as I mentioned, many a staff officer at ISAF Joint Command were getting all stressed about it.

Fighting Season officially begins tomorrow (Sunday) on April 28th, which corresponds to Afghanistan's "Mujahideen Victory Day" which is also observed on Sunday.

In other amusing Afghanistan news, today at lunch one of my colleagues was discussing how he doesn't want Afghanistan to change its culture, "Afghanistan is fine for Afghans. We shouldn't be trying to change anything. That's like walking into someone's house and stating, 'you should really change the color of those walls.'"

I responded with, "so we're somebody's annoying mother in law?"

Poor Database Management

In a shocking bit of news, ISAF has announced that the drop in attacks that was reported is not actually correct, it was a mis-count of the stats.

Here's another article on the situation by the Christian Science Monitor.

This bit of "whoops we kind of screwed up the data" doesn't shock me at all from this organization. I'm not suggesting that ISAF Joint Command is a bunch of bumbling idiots, but battle tracking doesn't really seem to be their strong suit. They can certainly track incidents that occur on a big map that is displayed, but getting those incidents into the database seems to be a challenge. A few times I've been on current operations floor and seen an incident or two displayed that I've tried to look up when I got back to my desk only to discover that the incident isn't in the database.

Same for the next day, and the day after.

Hell, even the target set that I'm currently assisting in, Green on Blue attackers who have fled, is not immune to this problem. In the past couple of weeks there have been multiple GoB attacks that we have "discovered" that somehow never made it into the database and had to be added.

How does this happen? Is it incompetence or an attempt to hide the truth?

From my perspective it is neither. It's just what happens when you have a large headquarters with multiple different nations attempting to do several things at once. Plates are going to get dropped.

I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating...the number of attacks isn't even that critical of a metric to track when it comes to an insurgency. A low number of attacks in an area may indicate that the insurgency is defeated in that area, or that there are no security forces in that area and the insurgents actually control it. The flip side, a high number of attacks may indicate that insurgents are not in control and are trying to gain dominance.

So I suppose what I'm trying to say is, this failure by ISAF to properly account for attacks isn't that big of a deal. However, ISAF needs to get its shit together.