Military-Civil Partnership Shines in Helmand, Diplomat Says

By Lisa Daniel
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1, 2011 – The senior U.S. civilian representative in Afghanistan today described as “rich” and “complex” the military-civilian partnership he and others say has brought great progress to the country’s southwest region.

The State Department’s J. Paul Reid, who is located with the U.S. 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force, and Michael O’Neill, the senior British civilian representative in the area, spoke to the Pentagon press corps via video teleconference about dramatic changes in Helmand province and surrounding areas.

“Anyone who wants to create a model of best practices should come here to Helmand,” Reid said of the partnership that includes U.S., British, Danish, Estonian and Afghan forces alongside the State Department and other international civilian agencies.

“We work hand-in-glove,” O’Neill agreed. “And the areas of the best progress are where communications and coordination are the closest. Teamwork is absolutely essential.”

Even people in Afghanistan have been unaware of how much things have changed in Helmand since U.S. and British Marines pushed out the Taliban and secured the area, Reid and O’Neill said. Only a few years ago, they said, Helmand was under harsh Taliban rule without government services, medical care or roads, and girls weren’t permitted to attend school.

Today, through the work of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, Helmand has a network of paved roads that make a loop through the region and extend to the Iranian border, allowing commerce to thrive and making it harder for insurgents to plant roadside bombs, they said.

Poppies -- the root of the illegal heroin trade -- are being replaced with high-value alfalfa and other crops, they said, and irrigation systems are improving agriculture.

Helmand’s residents are enjoying a closer relationship with the national government in Kabul, which has improved services and sent numerous judges, prosecutors, teachers and other public servants to the province. There are now 133 schools in Helmand, the officials said, and 20,000 of 90,000 students are girls, they said. Helmand’s elected representatives include 38 women.

“We’re in a better place today than we’ve ever been in,” Reid said.

As security improves, they said, the emphasis now is on training and bringing in foreign investments. The World Bank, United Nations, and Asia Development Bank were among the participants in a recent international donors conference, the officials said, which included two days of seminars on investment needs in construction of dams, canals, roads and other projects.

The Afghans also have made great strides toward self governance, Reid said. “We’ve moved from doing these things for them to making it possible for them to do it themselves,” he said.

Perhaps the greatest threat to sustained progress in the area is government corruption, the pair said. “It’s definitely a serious impediment to foreign investment,” Reid said, adding that he considers it the biggest obstacle to private investment in Afghanistan.

ISAF workers have been working to reduce corruption, but “ultimately, it’s a cultural shift that will have to go on” as Afghans increasingly work with the international community, Reid said.

The Afghan government will make an important showing as the sole host of the upcoming 3rd Bonn Conference on International Development Policy in Germany, O’Neill said. The conference, he said, will set the stage for other major venues for potential investment in Afghanistan, such as the NATO summit to be held in Chicago in May.

“We look to this conference to demonstrate, once again, how Afghanistan is taking control of its own destiny,” Reid said.

Commander Outlines Situation in Southwest Afghanistan

By Karen Parrish

American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, June 16, 2011 – Key areas in Afghanistan’s Helmand and Nimroz provinces are likely candidates for the second or third rounds of transition to Afghan security, the U.S. commander there said today.

Marine Corps Maj. Gen. John A. Toolan Jr., commander of Regional Command Southwest, briefed Pentagon reporters by video uplink from his Helmand province headquarters at Camp Leatherneck.

Helmand’s capital of Lashkar Gah is designated as one of the first to transition in July, and security efforts in districts including Reg-e Khan Neshin, Garmshir, Nawa and Marjah have been a “tremendous success” over the past two years, he said.

“Many of those districts will be identified for transition in lead security in either the next tranche or the following tranche,” the commander said, noting the next rounds of security transition lead will likely be in January or February and July of 2012.

Toolan took command in March of a force that includes 30,000 service members from the United States, United Kingdom, Estonia, Denmark, the Republic of Georgia, Bahrain and Tonga. Coalition forces in the two provinces are partnered with the Afghan army’s 215th Corps.

The year’s poppy and wheat harvests are complete and the fighting season is now under way in his area, Toolan said. He added that his objective over the next six months is to “deepen the hold” coalition and Afghan forces have established in the central Helmand River Valley.

“We need to thicken our hold in some places, mostly in the north,” the general said.

Troop operations over the summer and into the fall will focus on strengthening security in the upper Sangin and upper Goresh Valleys, Toolan said, as well as in the area around the Kajaki Dam, which supplies power and irrigation to districts farther south.

Toolan cited reducing funding for insurgent activity in the south as a major accomplishment in the region.

“We’ve been able to do that by attacking the narcotics nexus,” he said, “that combination of Taliban insurgent and narcotics producer.”

Since April, coalition and Afghan forces have seized some 30,000 tons of poppies, with an estimated market value of $65 million, he said.

While some estimates put 30,000 tons as only 2 percent of the total harvest, the general said, “We can tell just by intelligence gathering that it’s had a significant impact, particularly in the south.”

Toolan said security transition around Lashkar Gah is going well, but he expects insurgents to attack the area and try to reduce the local population’s confidence in the government.

“I think we have a pretty good plan in place,” he said. “We won’t let the transition in Lashkar Gah fail.”

As security transition efforts move ahead in Helmand and Nimroz, Toolan said, one key issue will be progress among the Afghan police, who will be responsible for protecting the population and securing justice.

“There are some things, some perceptions that need to be overcome with the police,” he said. “But we see progress.”

Toolan said the security transfer in Lashkar Gah will involve building more checkpoints around the city by January. Those checkpoints will be manned by Afghan army troops, and gradually taken over by police forces. Eventually, he said, the police will phase back from the checkpoints into local precincts.

“That’s going to take time, and I would suspect that the full transition … will probably take a good year, year-and-a-half,” the general said.

The projected total end strength for Afghan army and police forces this year is 352,000, he said, and the army is “moving along incredibly well.”

“The majority of them … are operating at pretty good capacity,” Toolan said. “They’re well trained; they generally have a second-grade reading level, and they’ve got some good leadership development going.”

The general said over the next year and through 2014, when Afghan forces are set to assume security responsibility throughout the country, coalition combat troops need to assume a more advisory role to ensure their Afghan counterparts gain the experience they need.

While progress in Afghanistan has often been called fragile and reversible, Toolan said, “I think what we really mean is that the local nationals can easily be intimidated by insurgents moving into their areas.”

The Afghan local police program recruits young men, approved by and often related to their tribal elders, to help protect their own villages from insurgent intimidation, he said.

“But if they’re not able to stand up, or if they are co-opted by the insurgents, then that fragility … occurs,” he said. “It becomes a problem, then, to get back into the villages and try to re-establish a secure environment.”

The most-difficult challenge is convincing the people they can stand up to insurgents, Toolan said.

The Afghan central government has a vital responsibility to strengthen its effectiveness at the village, district and provincial levels, he said.

Helmand’s governor and district councils are working effectively with coalition forces, the U.S. commander said.

“The real challenge will come as more and more is turned over to the national government,” Toolan said. “[Direction] has to be fed through the national government down through the various ministry pipelines.”

Toolan said civilian mentorship from the British-led provincial reconstruction team, the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development are crucial to developing Afghan governmental capacity.

“The provincial reconstruction team, with augmentation from [coalition forces], is about 200 people,” he said. “The regional platform, which is our State Department-run organization, is currently about 35 people but is going to increase … to about 75 or 80.”

As more civilians join the effort, Toolan said, it’s vital to bring in people with the right skills: those who can mentor Afghan agricultural experts, engineers and financiers.

“That’s how I think we’ll make greater progress,” he said. “My hope is that, on the civilian surge side, is that we bring in those aggressive, hungry, talented people who will drive that mentoring and advising role with the Afghans.”

Obama Meets With Rasmussen on Afghanistan

By Lisa Daniel

American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, March 14, 2011 – President Barack Obama today thanked Denmark’s prime minister for his country’s contributions in Afghanistan and said the two will continue to work closely on that issue and others.

Obama welcomed Lars Lokke Rasmussen to the White House where the two discussed “a wide range of issues,” including Afghanistan, Libya and Japan, as well as their cooperation on antiterrorism efforts, the president said in a statement following the meeting.

The United States is especially grateful “of the sacrifices that have been made by Danish troops in Afghanistan, and the extraordinary leadership that Denmark has shown as part of” NATO’s International Security Assistance Force there, Obama said.

Denmark is a small country and, proportionate to its size, “it’s made as significant an effort and made as many sacrifices as anybody in helping to stabilize Afghanistan and now help to effectuate a transition to Afghan leadership,” the president said.

Danish troops “are fighting in some of the toughest areas, without caveat,” Obama said. “We have discussed how 2011 is going to be a year of transition” with Afghans taking over more of their own security. Under Rasmussen’s leadership, “he has been able to build a consensus within Denmark about how that transition would proceed that I think is a model for all our allies and participants in Afghanistan.

“So, we are grateful for the excellent work that he has done personally, and obviously most grateful for the sacrifices of Danish troops in helping to underwrite the security of all of us,” he continued.

Turning to the issue of political uprisings in the Middle East, Obama said Rasmussen has been a leader in helping to apply sanctions against Libyan leader Mommar Gadhafi, and humanitarian assistance to people displaced in the region.

“We will be continuing to coordinate closely both through NATO, as well as the United Nations and other international forces, to look at every single option that’s available to us in bringing about a better outcome for the Libyan people,” the president said.

The two leaders also discussed their cooperation on counterterrorism efforts and continued efforts to provide assistance to Japan, parts of which were devastated last week by an 8.9 magnitude earthquake followed by a tsunami.

“Although Japan is a highly advanced economy and technologically equipped to rebuild at this moment of crisis, it’s important that all of us join together, providing any help and assistance we can in the days and months to come,” Obama said. “I’m in close contact with [Japanese] Prime Minister Kan and our teams are in close cooperation, as is our military, in the region. And we expect to continue that cooperation until we have some stabilization of the situation there.”