Morale good in Afghanistan, says Whitehouse
Source: Pawtucket Times
November 14, 2008
After a Veterans Day weekend visit to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse left impressed with the level of morale and motivation demonstrated by U.S. troops and the troops' confidence in and affinity for the Afghan soldier they are training.
"The American effort is being accomplished extremely professionally with a very high level of tempo and technical sophistication," Whitehouse said. "The level of morale of everyone I talked to from Gen. (David) McKiernan (commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force) to the soldiers from Rhode Island who were serving there just couldn't be higher."
The senator, who traveled with a congressional delegation headed by Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe, said he was struck by "the extent of affection and regard for the Americans for their Afghani counterparts.
There is some frustration at dealing with people who are essentially operating in a feudal environment, many of whom live lives no different than they did in the Medieval Era. But notwithstanding those frustrations, the willingness to learn, the eagerness to fight, the patriotism, all of those things the Americans have found very appealing.
"The loyalty between them, the mutual affection and regard, was a very compelling thing," Whitehouse related. "The Special Forces guys say with real feeling: ‘when we are out with (the Afghanis), we don't worry about our own safety, they protect us like we were family. They protect us fiercely.' The loyalty between the two and the mutual affection and regard was a very compelling thing."
"Indefatigable" was the word Whitehouse used to describe the Afghani soldiers. "They are extremely brave and fierce fighters, but they have never worked with logistics. They have never had air support; they have never had to really follow chain of command. You have to take their actual martial gifts and train them to operate in a modern military infrastructure. They love it because they see the effects."
Whitehouse, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that beyond training the military over there, "a great deal of our effort is to building in some of the basic logistics of governance into these provinces. So there is a lot of lots of building and rebuilding of both physical and administrative infrastructure so that the country can run like a modern country.
"It's the fourth poorest country in the world," he noted, "it's very feudal in terms of the warlord structure, so it's quite a novelty to have modern practices of governance and military support. But the folks over there who are that are very, very happy with how the Afghani military in particular are really thirsting for it and lap it up and take to it very quickly."
The freshman senator said he was also impressed by "how forward-leaning our troops are." Rather than griping about when they could come home, or the discomforts in the field, he said, the one thing they wanted more than anything was to be able to operate on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border when they are chasing the enemy around at night in the mountains.
Pakistan, as an issue of "sovereignty," Whitehouse said, does not want the Afghani or U.S. troops operating on their territory.
He said Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence Agency, which Whitehouse referred to as "the notorious ISI" has ties to the Taliban and al Qaeda, "back to when we used the ISI to fund these very same people and to arm these very same people when they were fighting the Russians" in the 1980s. "So we don't have completely clean hands in this whole ISI-Taliban relationship."
Under the previous government of President Pervez Musharraf, Whitehouse said, the ISI worked independently "or with a wink" in a way that helped the Taliban and al Qaeda.
"The new government has a different perspective," Whitehouse said, "they very much want the ISI to fight the Taliban and al Qaeda, work with us and be our ally."
On the homefront, asked what help Rhode Island could expect from the federal government to ease the state's economic woes, Whitehouse said he is hoping for two stimulus packages to come out of Congress, one before the end of the year and another "more helpful one" after the new Congress and Obama administration take charge.
He hopes for a "significant emphasis on infrastructure. In these economically perilous times, for people to be sure of jobs is a very strong foundation for recovery.
"God knows we have plenty of roads and bridges and water and sewer infrastructure that the work is overdue on," he said. "Rhode Island could put a lot of people to work in a hurry if we could get that stimulus package."
Whitehouse is proposing a three-pronged stimulus, the infrastructure work, school improvements and repairs - "a lot of our schools need work," he said - and home weatherization, which could put people to work, help residents save on energy costs and decrease reliance on oil.