Safe, Expensive & Stupid

FRI's babatim has a new post about Jalalabad's current status as a "white," or dangerous, city.

babatim doesn't have a lot of faith in the idea of locking down a city - and even less in the reasons for why the city was locked down. Here's his awesome run down of why this was a bad idea:

So today Jalalabad was on lock down to the international community. Declared a “white city” by [the United Nations Department of Safety & Security] due to two factors; a report of “five female BBIED (Body Borne Improvised Explosive Device) bombers who are looking to strike important targets” and reporting by various international security agencies of “spectacular attacks,” while President Karzai is in London attending an international conference. There has never been a female suicide bomber in Afghanistan to the best of my knowledge and there is no historical correlation to President Karzai attending international meetings and “spectacular” attacks. The (smart) military intelligence analysts dismissed the female suicide bomber story out of hand – they had seen similar reporting weeks ago and found nothing to substantiate them.

The smaller reconstruction projects which The Bot and I consult for ignored the White City and carried on with our daily routine. International reconstruction specialists cost the taxpayers of America over $1000 per day, so locking them down for no reason is a very expensive mistake. The military knew the principal threat spooking the UN security people was bogus, but they don’t talk to each other much. Both the UN and the military are operating inside huge bureaucratic closed loops – neither organization has the capacity to get into the local environment to conduct real time assessments. Only the small fries in the reconstruction business: JICA, CADG, CHF, etc… pay attention to White Information because they have to in order to operate. The large bureaucracies react to bogus intel which flows around the closed, insulated loops – their analysts deal with emails not people. They have the money which allows them to spend day after day on “lockdown” due to “threat warnings” generated by people who lack local access and situational awareness.

The military is even worse – everyday several times a day they fly people between the Jalalabad PRT and the army base at the Jalalabad airport. That is a trip of no more than 400 meters. You could walk it in 15 minutes – you could run shuttle buses between the camps all day every day for maybe 50 dollars a day. Do you know how much it costs for one flight hour in a military helicopter? Does the military honestly believe that the 200 meters of route one separating their bases is so dangerous that it warrants flying helicopters between them? Of course not – but flying in helicopters is easier than running four vehicle MRAP convoys and every time a soldier drives outside the front gate of a base he has to be in a four vehicle convoy with at least 16 riflemen. Who the hell can afford to spend money this way? Helicopter crashes in Afghanistan routinely kill two to three times more military members than the Taliban has ever been able to kill even when they mass their best fighters against isolated positions held by only a handful of Americans. Why is flying in a helicopter safer than a 15 minute walk or 5 minute bus ride? In large bureaucracies cost efficiency and common sense are not part of the operational paradigm.