Kids And Their Toys In Afghanistan

For the last two months, 12,000 NATO troops, and 7,000 Afghan soldiers and police, have been swarming all over Kandahar province, systematically taking down Taliban bases, safe houses, headquarters and bomb workshops. This culminated on the recent air-land assault on the Horn of Panjwai (a hilly, and heavily fortified Taliban base area, 30 kilometers long and 10 kilometers at its widest, shaped like a rhino horn). The Taliban have controlled this rural area for four years, but now admit they have been forced to abandon it. However, the Taliban also say they were return from their Pakistan sanctuaries when the foreign troops leave.
The successful offensive relied on several factors.

Intelligence was the biggest reason. The additional UAVs, intel aircraft and intelligence analysts reaching Afghanistan in the last year have made their mark. Much more is known about the enemy, and the foe can be monitored 24/7 when necessary. The Taliban were surprised at the speed and accuracy of the attacks, and how follow up raids, based on just captured information, were carried out. This was all possible because of good intelligence, that was constantly updated. All these operations were also carried out with little or no publicity. The troops, and the smart munitions, were just suddenly there. Few protracted firefights. Just a lot of initial noise, and then a systematic clean up.

Cell phones are very common throughout Kandahar province. While more tips are coming in from disgruntled Afghans (who are getting tired of the Taliban, even if they are the home team), the Taliban are also very reliant on them. Now the Taliban are well aware of the fact that the Americans can tap into cell phone networks, but too many Taliban use them freely anyway. Smart phones are particularly popular, and newly recruited Taliban will often blow their first month's pay on one, and then do all sorts of stuff with their new toy, providing American intel analysts with lots of useful information. This drives the Taliban leaders nuts, but you know how it is with kids and their toys.

Precision weapons are being used more often, even with the more restrictive ROE (Rules of Engagement). The better intel about Taliban hideouts made it more possible to hit targets that did not have local civilians rounded up as human shields. With NATO troops on the move a lot, more Taliban were flushed out into the open. Thus, last month, warplanes made 700 attacks with smart bombs, missiles or cannon fire (more than twice as many as were made in September 2009). Add to that hundred of attack helicopter and UAV attacks, and you have some three dozen attacks a day (and these were often at night). In addition, the American soldiers and marines fired hundreds of GPS guided rockets and 155mm artillery shells. These were particularly unnerving for the Taliban, because they came without any warning. You can often spot a warplane or UAV up in the sky, and head for cover. But the guided 227mm rockets just hit, within a few meters of the aiming point, and could take down an entire compound.

Air mobility allowed assault troops to bypass roads well covered with mines and roadside bombs. The Taliban planned on these roads to slow down approaching troops so that a proper getaway could be organized. Not so when the helicopters came in at night, sometimes after a few smart bombs or guided rockets had hit.

Defeat of the IED (Improvised Explosive Device, the bombs and mines) has deprived the Taliban of their main weapon. Last month, 1,320 IEDs were encountered by NATO and Afghan forces. Most were destroyed, disarmed or simply marked and avoided. Less than 14 percent of them went off, killing 24 foreign troops. It was a repeat of what happened in Iraq, with American troops neutralizing enemy IED tactics faster than those tactics could be modified and improved.

Kandahar has a population of 950,000, about half of it in the city of Kandahar. It's the homeland of the most important Taliban leaders, and many of their early followers. It's second to adjacent Helmand province in opium and heroin production. These two province produce most of the world's heroin.

The Taliban didn't just get hammered in Kandahar, but all across southern Afghanistan, and in those areas of the north where there has been some Taliban activity. A lot of this anti-Taliban activity has actually been aimed at the drug operations the Taliban guard. The heroin gangs have had a bad year, what with a fungus that wiped out half the opium crop, and more attacks on labs (that turn opium into heroin) and caches of drugs and smuggling operations in general. No wonder the Taliban are trying to negotiate a peace deal.

Hoo-ah: Task Force Odin (The Math Machine) going to the 'Stan'

The U.S. Army is deploying the same kind of "math and missiles" unit that defeated roadside bombs in Iraq, to Afghanistan.

For the last two years, "Task Force Odin" has used of manned and UAV aerial reconnaissance aircraft, along with pattern analysis and data mining, to find IEDs (roadside bombs), and the people who plant them in Iraq.

Task Force Odin was reported in the "Old Media" mainly as aircraft and UAVs watching the roads for signs of IEDs, and UAVs, while helicopters and gunships opened fire on terrorists trying to set up roadside bombs. Explosions and dead bodies are more of mass media staple than massive use of math, no matter how critical the number crunching was to the undertaking.

Task Force Odin is really about two very different technologies. On the one hand there was the effort to provide Internet like access to live video feeds from aircraft and UAVs. The U.S. Air Force and SOCOM (Special Operations Command) have been particularly keen on this, and has shared the technology with the other services, and friendly nations.

The less publicized effort was Constant Hawk. This was a U.S. Army image analysis system that's basically just another pattern analysis system. However, it's been a very successful system when it comes to finding newly planted IEDs. Last year, the U.S. Army named Constant Hawk one of the top ten inventions of the year. The army does this to give some of the more obscure, yet very valuable, developments some well deserved recognition.

Pattern analysis is one of the fundamental tools Operations Research (OR) practitioners have been using since World War II (when the newly developed field of OR got its first big workout). Pattern analysis is widely used on Wall Street, by engineers, law enforcement, marketing specialists, and now, the military.

Constant Hawk uses a special video camera system to observe a locality and find useful patterns of behavior. Some of the Constant Hawk systems are mounted on light (C-12s, mainly) aircraft, others are mounted on ground structures. Special software compares photos from different times.

When changes are noted, they are checked more closely, which has resulted in the early detection of thousands of roadside bombs and terrorist ambushes. This has largely eliminated roadside bomb attacks on supply convoys, which travel the same routes all the time. But those routes are also watched by Constant Hawk. No matter what the enemy does, the Hawk will notice.

Eventually, the Hawk, and several other efforts, morphed into Task Force Odin. The Task Force Odin led to the death of over 3,000 terrorists caught in the act of setting up roadside bombs, or lying in wait to set them off and attack their victims with gunfire. Hundreds more terrorists were captured, and many thousands of roadside bombs were avoided or destroyed before they could go off.

All this geeekery works, and the troops like tools of this sort mainly because the systems retain photos of areas they have patrolled, and allows them to retrieve photos of a particular place on a particular day. Often, the troops returning from, or going out on a patrol, can use the pattern analysis skills we all have, to spot something suspicious, or potentially so.

A related math tool is predictive analysis. This has been widely used in Iraq to determine who the bombers are, where they are, and where they are most likely to place their bombs next.

This has enabled the geeks-with-guns (the Army OR specialists) to offer regular "weather reports" about expected IED activity. The troops take these reports very seriously, especially by those who run the hundreds of daily convoys that move people and supplies around Iraq.

If your route is predicted to be "hot", you pay extra attention that day, and often spot IEDs that, as predicted, were there. Usually, the predictions are used to send the engineers and EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) teams out to scout and clean the route. It's the feedback from these guys that has brought the geeks their reputation. If the geeks, and their tools (computers, aerial images, and math), say there is something bad out there, they are generally right. For the geeks, it's all pretty obvious. Given enough data, you can predict all sorts of things, or just about anything, really.

But to many people, including 'Old Media', it's all still magic. Task Force Odin is the latest name for an effort that has been going on for over four years, and traces its origins back to World War II, and the invention of Operations Research in the decade before that.

Afghanistan is different from Iraq, in terms of geography and the psychology of the enemy. But this doesn't matter to the math machine. It analyzes, it understands, and it tells you what the bad guys are up to and where they are.

Hoo-ah: Freedom Watch Afghanistan - 03 July 2008

The latest from Operation Enduring Freedom showing the activities of American troops in country. Produced by AFN-Afghanistan.