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Colonel Harry Tunnell 

Michael Yon recently published a remarkable and courageous letter by US Army Colonel Harry Tunnell to the Secretary of the Army regarding deficiencies in our military operations in Afghanistan.  Colonel Tunnell is now retired, but the letter was sent while he was on active duty in 2010. Yon calls it “stunning” and I wholeheartedly agree. It is a “must read“.

Colonel Tunnell is a controversial figure in the Army. A bluntly outspoken critic of COIN with strong views on military professionalism and tactical leadership, he served as a commander of combat troops in Afghanistan and in Iraq, where he was badly wounded. Overcoming his injury, Colonel Tunnel returned to command a Stryker brigade in Afghanistan and clash with his ISAF superiors over his use of older Army doctrine on counter-guerrilla operations instead of the pop-centric COIN of FM 3-24.  Tunnell aggressively and repeatedly attacked the Taliban in his area of operations, pressing them, which resulted in frequent combat and casualties on both sides – something that was out-of-step with ISAF’s tactical guidance. Several enlisted soldiers in the Stryker brigade were convicted of the infamous “Kill Team” murders which led to Tunnell being investigated and cleared by the Army which found no causal responsibility from Tunnell’s advocacy of aggressive tactics but nonetheless reprimanded him for “poor command climate”.

In light of  Tunnell’s letter to the Secretary of the Army, interpret that administrative action as you wish. Afterwards, Colonel Tunnell continued to be a harsh critic of COIN and the focus of periodic,  extremely one-sided, negative stories in the media.

When Yon published his piece on Tunnell’s letter, I commented to him on a private listserv and he asked permission to use it, which I gave:

Mark Safranski Comments Col (ret.) Harry Tunnell 

The following email came from Mark Safranski subsequent his reading this letter from Colonel (ret.) Harry Tunnell.  The letter.

===Email from Mr. Safranski:===

Interesting, this part in particular:

“”A gross lack of concern for subordinates,” Tunnell wrote, “manifests itself in guidance that ‘zero’ civilian casualties are acceptable and coalition soldiers may have to be killed rather than defend themselves against a potential threat and risk being wrong and possibly resulting in injury or death of a civilian.”
….Tunnell’s memo exhibits particular disdain for British Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, commander of NATO forces in Regional Command South, which includes the Arghandab District where Sitton was killed.

It was Carter, Tunnell wrote, whose verbal order led commanders to risk their own troops rather than Afghan civilians – something Sitton complained about two years later in an email to his wife.”

Very helpful. I finally get it now.

I was always curious, reading threads [on private listserv] here on Afghanistan, how Colonel Tunnell was able to openly pursue counter-guerrilla operations in Afghanistan when pop-centric COIN was the heavy-handed, top-down and rigidly enforced tactical paradigm; Harry, IMHO, could do this because the *verbal* orders being issued went far beyond FM 3-24 theory into an unauthorized and unofficial but *politically desired* British policing model used in Northern Ireland. A kind of tactical guidance that could not be put in writing and enforced through the UCMJ because the American people would have found that guidance to be politically intolerable and morally outrageous – and rightly so.

Unlike Catholics in Ulster who are subjects of the Crown, Afghans are not American citizens and American soldiers and Marines are not cops in a bad neighborhood. Nor is the Taliban the IRA. Minimizing civilian casualties is a good and worthy goal; valuing political atmospherics over American lives is a sign of gross incompetence, at best.

Hence the anonymous leaks and smears about Harry to politically connected  Beltway scribes instead. Tunnell’s superiors were afraid to air their real dispute…..

Read the rest here.

In my view, Tunnell’s letter raises critical questions that every officer has a duty to raise with his superiors in the chain of command if, in their view, operations are not properly being carried out, which endangers the campaign and the lives of the troops. Moreover, if the United States military is to adhere to some bizarre, complicated, unworkable “law enforcement model” ROE not required by the Laws of War, or even our own COIN doctrine, then this is a subject for Congressional hearings and testimony from the administration, not something to be instituted on the sly using allied foreign officers.

Wanting to police the world is hard enough without making our soldiers into policemen.

The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor by Jake Tapper

Influential ABC News Senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper has a new book coming out in November entitled The Outpost, about the battle of Outpost Keating in 2009 that the Taliban lost but inflicted high casualties on American troops and led to an ignominious withdrawal. Tapper’s PR folks have sent me an advance review copy, and at first glance, the book uncomfortably reminded me of Sebastian Junger’s WAR.

Sure enough, the site of Combat Outpost Keating in Nuristan is compared by Tapper to Junger’s deadly Korengal valley by page 6.  The xenophobic and remote Nuristanis were the last Afghans to convert to Islam, only by force, in the 1890’s. Their distant kin, the Kalash, are polytheists still.  Great place for an American outpost.

Looks like a gripping story. Will review in the near future.

[by J. Scott Shipman]

This is worth the 20 minutes. Strategy without clarity, isn’t. There is no clarity or strategy to our current problems in Afghanistan.

“We have killed all the slow and stupid ones. But that means the ones that are left are totally dedicated.” Ambassador Ryan Crocker

Cross posted at To Be or To Do.
H/T Feral Jundi at Facebook.

[ by Charles Cameron — for Madhu ]
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Our friend Madhu has requested that I post poems here on occasion, and this particular poem made me think of her and her request, so here it is:

A copper and gold koan
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The world happened, the world is drifting away,
the farther away the world floats the deeper into the mists.

In Mes Aynak, Afghanistan, the remains
of a buddhist monastery already eroded by time are adrift,
a sitting buddha is floating into the mist,
headless, gold paint still on his knees and robe,
the devotion has drifted, lifted its focus
to the one without a second, the buddha left
whatever he left in memory, lingering, to gather aromas
of other ideas, realms, dust, archaeology, oblivion,
there is change, ceaseless change,

and adults must decide: is the wealth implied by the copper
beneath the buddha worth more than a trace of halo,
as the moon moves once again across a brilliant night sky.

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Koans are those brilliant paradoxes zen buddhism uses to pry the mind open, I think they’re important aids to handling complexity, and I have a post about them coming up shortly. Here, it’s enough to say that the issue of copper mining vs archaeology in Mes Aynak seems to me to be a living, breathing koan.

**

It’s awkward, when you write an “ekphrastic” poem, a poem about a painting or photo, to have the image right there when the poem is read, because it trammels the reader’s mind in much the same way that a film can trammel the mind of a reader into “seeing” only the film-maker’s Gandalf, no longer her or his own.

And I’m going on at some length about this, because next up is the image from which that particular poem was built, but I’d like the image to be, as they’d say in the newsprint world, “below the fold” as you read the poem.

So here it is, #4 in a fine series of photos in a Foreign Policy photo essay which I recommend, although I’ve taken this particular (smaller) version from a CNN page, since the subtitle in the lower right corner explains the basic situation handily:

You can hear the archaeologist Brent Huffman, who took the photo, talk about the situation here — local reactions pro and con, who the Taliban are shooting at, the likelihood that the Chinese operation will in fact benefit the locals and more:

The koan of balancing material with immaterial values remains, but in this circumstance the likelihood of local Afghans receiving litter or nothing from the mining project likely tips the scales.

You can petition Afghan President Hamid Karzai for preservation…

But then he’s another wild-card in the continuing Great Game, isn’t it?

[ by Charles Cameron — the symbolic importance of Mullah Omar with the cloak of the Prophet, comparative, frankly long, and IMO worth it ]
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I would like to give you a sense of the significance of an apparently insignificant detail, which I was reminded of today while skimming Charles Kurzman‘s The Missing Martyrs: Why There Are So Few Muslim Terrorists, page 74:

To gain legitimacy as he was taking over Afghanistan,Taliban leader Mulla Muhammad Umar literally wrapped himself in the cloak of the Prophet Muhammad, a cherished relic stored for two centuries at a shrine in Qandahar. He ordered the custodians to unlock the sanctuary, then stood on the roof of a nearby mosque and placed his hands in the cloth as a crowd of supporters chanted “Commander of the Faithful,” a title associated with the first caliphs to succeed the Prophet Muhammad.

To better grasp the significance of the situation, I will first quote from the Jewish and Buddhist scriptures to illuminate the symbolic power that can be vested — interesting word — in a cloak or robe.

**

John Daido Loori is a zen master in whose teishos or teachings I often find insight and delight. Here’s his description of the original transmission of “bowl and robe” in Buddhism, from the Buddha to his disciple Mahakashyapa:

After Buddha died, Ananda became the attendant of Mahakashyapa. One day he asked, “That time on Mount Gudhakutra, when the World-Honored One gave you the bowl and robe, and transmitted the Dharma to you, what else did he give you?” Mahakashyapa called out, “Ananda.” Ananda responded, “Yes, Master?” Mahakashyapa said, “Take down the flagpole.” At that point, Ananda finally had a realization. He realized what Mahakashyapa had realized. So it has been, down through successive generations, mind-to-mind for 2,500 years.

The Buddha’s teaching later passes from India into China, where the transmission continues. Here’s how Hui Neng, in the Platform Sutra, describes his own enlightenment and reception of the teachings:

At midnight the Fifth Patriarch called me into the hall and expounded the Diamond Sutra to me. Hearing it but once, I was immediately awakened, and that night I received the Dharma. None of the others knew anything about it. Then he transmitted to me the Dharma of Sudden Enlightenment and the robe, saying: ‘I make you the Sixth Patriarch. The robe is the proof and is to be handed down from generation to generation. My Dharma must be transmitted from mind to mind. You must make people awaken to themselves.’

**

There’s a remarkable story told in 2 Kings 2.8-15 that concerns the transmission of prophetic gifts by similar means, when the prophet Elijah is carried up into heaven:

And Elijah took his mantle, and wrapped it together, and smote the waters, and they were divided hither and thither, so that they two went over on dry ground. And it came to pass, when they were gone over, that Elijah said unto Elisha, Ask what I shall do for thee, before I be taken away from thee. And Elisha said, I pray thee, let a double portion of thy spirit be upon me. And he said, Thou hast asked a hard thing: nevertheless, if thou see me when I am taken from thee, it shall be so unto thee; but if not, it shall not be so.

And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. And Elisha saw it, and he cried, My father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof. And he saw him no more: and he took hold of his own clothes, and rent them in two pieces.

He took up also the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and went back, and stood by the bank of Jordan; And he took the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and smote the waters, and said, Where is the Lord God of Elijah? and when he also had smitten the waters, they parted hither and thither: and Elisha went over. And when the sons of the prophets which were to view at Jericho saw him, they said, The spirit of Elijah doth rest on Elisha. And they came to meet him, and bowed themselves to the ground before him.

The beauty, the power in this telling comes from the cloak’s ability to part the waters, as on an earlier occasion Moses‘ staff had done, not merely in the hands on Elijah, but also, once the transmission has been made, in the hands of Elisha. It is that double motif of the parting of the waters that demonstrates the efficacy of the prophetic transmission.

Coming fresh from the Buddha, Mahakashyapa, Hui Neng, Elijah and Elisha, we should be ready to appreciate that the mantle, cloak or robe of a sacred person is imbued with that person’s power — Matthew 14.36 describes crowds bringing the sick to Jesus:

that they might only touch the hem of his garment: and as many as touched were made perfectly whole.

**

In light of these examples, let us consider the reports of the day when Mullah Omar was proclaimed Amir of the Faithful:

There was a tremendous stir in Kandahar: we followed the crowds to a mosque in the city center. The Taliban had been holding an assembly of mullahs from all over Afghanistan. Now the results were about to be made public. Holy war was announced against the government of President Rabbani in Kabul. The head of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, was declared to be the Amir or leader of all Muslims everywhere. Because this was regarded as a key moment for the Afghan nation, Mullah Omar displayed the holy cloak of the Prophet Muhammad to the crowd. It’s kept in Kandahar and shown only in times of crisis. The last time was sixty years ago. Neither the cloak nor the ceremony has ever been filmed before, not has Mullah Omar. People in the crowd threw up their turbans to touch the cloak and be blessed by it. It was like being at some great religious ceremony in the Middle Ages.

That’s from the soundtrack of a video I sadly can’t post here, but which you can see for yourself on a BBC site under the title Mullah Omar reveals the Prophet’s cloak.

Adam Curtis, who posted the clip, describes it thus:

In the early 90s the students returned to Afghanistan and set up the Taliban – to cleanse the country of a revolution that had gone wrong, compromised by the futile idea of modernising Islam. And in April 1996 Mullah Omar went to the Shrine of the Holy Cloak. He took out the cloak for the first time in 60 years and waved it from the roof – just as Amanullah had in 1929 – and announced a jihad against the Islamist factions in Kabul.

The BBC producer Tom Giles and John Simpson were in Kandahar that day – and they captured this extraordinary moment on video.

When King Amanullah had held the cloak above his head in 1929 it symbolised the end of his dreams of creating a modern world in Afghanistan. Now – in 1996 – Omar was saying the same thing – forget the future, listen to the ghosts of your past – and follow their rules.

Let’s note in passing that Omar holds the cloak up — neither in the video clip nor in the two accounts is it suggested that he wore it — and that it had previously been held up by Amanullah Shah in 1929.

**

For the symbolic impact as reported in the West, let’s turn to Tim Weiner‘s piece, Seizing the Prophet’s Mantle: Muhammad Omar, in the NYT of December 7, 2001:

And as the country was falling to the Taliban five and a half years ago, Mullah Omar literally cloaked himself in the trappings of the Prophet Muhammad.

On April 4, 1996, as the Taliban neared total control, he was moved by zeal to unseal a shrine in Kandahar that held a cloak believed to have belonged to the prophet, the founder of Islam. The cloak had not been touched since some time in the 1930’s. He lifted it in the air as he stood on a rooftop, displaying it to a crowd of followers. The event was caught on videotape, one of the very few times that he was ever photographed. He placed the cloak, which only the Prophet was said to have worn, upon his own shoulders.

And at that moment, he declared himself the commander of the faithful, the leader of all Islam. No one had claimed that title since the Fourth Caliph, more than 1,000 years ago.

That’s impressive stuff, and “Seizing the Prophet’s Mantle” and “Omar literally cloaked himself in the trappings of the Prophet” do a decent job of capturing the marriage of literal and symbolic that’s at work here.

But “he placed the cloak … upon his own shoulders”? I’m not so sure.

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It was a tremulous moment, evidently, even for Omar, as Norimitsu Onishi reported in the NYT a couple of weeks later on December 19, 2001, in A Tale of the Mullah and Muhammad’s Amazing Cloak:

The first time Mullah Muhammad Omar was allowed to enter the Shrine of the Cloak of the Prophet Muhammad here in Kandahar, and cast his gaze on the sacred ancient robe, he trembled. So disoriented was Mullah Omar that as he prepared to pray, he mistook the way toward Mecca.

“He turned to face toward the south,” recalled Qari Shawali, 48, the keeper of the prophet’s cloak. “So I made him change his position to turn toward Mecca.”

I suspect that here we have an indication that Omar was surprised by the event, that he was in fact acclaimed by the assembly of mullahs rather than claiming the robe and title for himself.

However, as the saying goes: Allah is the best of knowers.

**

Mujib Mashal‘s piece, The myth of Mullah Omar on al-Jazeera, 6 June 2012, gives us a few clues as to informed Afghan responses to the event, throwing in the detail that bin Laden was there at the time -– but also informing us that Omar “donned the cloak” and claiming this was the first time in 250 years that this had happened:

To formally announce his leadership in 1996, Mullah Omar, then 36 years old, brought forth the purported cloak of the Prophet Mohammed, one of Afghanistan’s most cherished Islamic relics. For the first time since the reign of Ahmad Shah Abdali more than 250 years before, Omar donned the cloak in the presence of about 1,500 religious leaders, including the late Osama bin Laden.

“Wearing the cloak was a masterstroke,” Sharifi said, adding that it linked the ex-guerrilla fighter to both Abdali and the Prophet. But Wahid Muzhda, an Afghan analyst and one-time high-ranking official in the Taliban foreign ministry, disputes that narrative. “From what I know, from sources close to Omar, and from a chat with the keeper of the shrine [where the cloak is kept], Omar did not wear the cloak.” “With great respect, he held the cloak in front of the religious leaders gathered for allegiance.”

This gesture, more than any other, was the impetus that allowed Mullah Omar, without any deep political or tribal base, to become the iron-fisted ruler of about 90 per cent of Afghanistan until the US invasion in 2001.

**

I know, you’re fatigued and I’m excited: bear with me, let’s hear the story of Ahmad Shah as told by Steve Inskeep on NPR in The Cloak of the Prophet some time in 2002:

According to the version of the legend that I heard, Ahmad Shah traveled to Bokhara — once one of the major centers of Islamic scholarship and culture, now a modern city in the former Soviet state of Uzbekistan . There he saw the sacred Cloak of the Prophet Mohammed, and decided to bring it home. He wanted Kandahar to have the artifact, so he asked to “borrow” the cloak from its keepers.

The keepers knew he might steal it, and told him he must not take the cloak from Bokhara. So Ahmad Shah pointed to a stone in the ground and made a promise. He said, “I will never take the cloak far away from this stone.”

Relieved, the keepers let him take the cloak. Ahmed Shah kept his word, in a sense. He had the stone taken up out of the ground, and had it carried back to Kandahar, along with the cloak, which he never returned. Today, the stone stands on a pedestal near the shrine.

The Cloak of the Prophet is normally hidden from public view. It is taken out only for special occasions. The last such occasion came in 1996, as the Taliban seized control of the country.

The Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, made what was considered a brilliant propaganda move. He took Mohammed’s shroud out of storage and wore it in a public rally, as a way to identify himself with the Prophet, and give himself legitimacy.

That’s an interesting tale in its own right, and reminds me of another Abrahamic treasure, the Stone of Scone, throned above which Scottish and British Kings and Queens are crowned. For your viewing delight: Stone of Destiny.

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Fast forward to July 1928, a more recent moment when Afghanistan was in crisis.
Adam Curtis reports in The Weird World of Waziristan, 5 April 2010:

Amanullah fled to Kandahar. He knew that his attempt at modernization had failed and to save himself he tried to prove that in reality he was a traditional Islamic monarch. He did it in a final dramatic gesture.

Amanullah went to the Shrine of the Holy Cloak in the centre of Kandahar. He opened up the brass bound chest where the cloak which was reputed to have been the Prophet’s had lain for over a 100 years. Amanullah lifted it above his head and demanded of the mullahs in front of him whether Allah would allow a heretic or an apostate to perform such a sacred act.

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And so to our most serious analytic effort on the topic, and a couple of indicators of the point I’m so often trying to make, here and in other posts on ZP. Here are Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason, writing in Terrorism, Insurgency, and Afghanistan as published by the Naval Postgraduate School, where both of them work in the Program for Culture & Conflict Studies:

Omar joined this rogues gallery of politicized insurgent Mullahs by means of a politico-religious stunt that is of enormous importance to the Taliban movement but that is considered insignificant by most Western analysts, if they are aware of it at all. In doing so, he became the epitome of the charismatic leader as described by Max Weber, who he defined as having:

… a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.

The event in question was Omar’s removal in 1994 of a sacred garment -— believed by many Afghans to be the original cloak worn by the Prophet Mohammed -– from its sanctuary in Kandahar, and actually wearing it while standing atop a mosque in the city. Whereas Omar had been a nonentity before this piece of religious theatre, the audacious stunt catapulted him to a level of mystical power (at least among the 90 percent of Pahstuns who are illiterate) in a manner that is almost impossible for Westerners to understand, and it resulted in his being proclaimed locally the Amir-ul Momineen, the Leader of the Faithful — not just of the Afghans but of all Muslims.

I would draw your particular attention to this phrase:

a politico-religious stunt that is of enormous importance to the Taliban movement but that is considered insignificant by most Western analysts, if they are aware of it at all.

Why? Why do we continually overlook such indications of the depth of feeling that animates the Taliban? Perhaps another analogy, from closer to home, will help us here.

I’m not sure that I’d call the exposition of the Shroud of Turin a “piece of religious theatre” or an “audacious stunt” — even if Pope Benedict, famously concerned at the secularization of Europe, visited it and remarked both on the Shroud as an icon of the death and burial of Christ, and of our era’s participation in the “death of God” “after the two World Wars, the lagers and the gulags, Hiroshima and Nagasaki”:

Jesus remained in the tomb until dawn of the day after the Sabbath and the Turin Shroud presents to us an image of how his body lay in the tomb during that period which was chronologically brief (about a day and a half), but immense, infinite in its value and in its significance.

You may regard the Son of God and the Prophet of Allah as similar figures or utterly different: but to understand the emotions roused by Mullah Omar’s gesture, these correspondences drawn from other religious traditions may provide a useful place to start.

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As for myself, I have a poet’s reverence for symbols, but I recognize that it is what they symbolize that is important — and so I’ll close as I began, with the Buddhist robe and bowl and another delighful teisho from Abbot Loori:

Ming was chasing after Hui-neng, determined to retrieve the bowl and robe of Bodhidharma from him. Finally, when he caught up to Hui-neng, the Sixth Ancestor put down the robe and bowl and said, “This robe was given to me on faith. How can it be fought for by force? I leave it for you to take it.” Ming tried to pick up the robe and bowl but couldn’t—they were as heavy as a mountain. He fell to his knees, trembling, and said, “I come for the teachings, not the robe. Please teach me, oh lay brother.” Completely open, completely receptive, completely ready, he was a man teetering on the brink of realization. Immediately, the Sixth Ancestor struck. “Think neither good nor evil,” he said. “At that very moment, what is the true self of monastic Ming?”