.Maverick U.S. officer builds 'security bubbles' in Afghanistan
ALTIMUR, Afghanistan – You may wonder how Thomas Gukeisen made it to lieutenant colonel, and by age 39 at that. He operates by his own version of counterinsurgency warfare, with an arsenal that includes Afghan poetry, chaos theory and the thoughts of a 17th-century English philosopher.
A towering, rough-and-ready 205-pounder, the officer from Carthage, N.Y., peppers his sentences with unprintables and reads Karl von Clausewitz's classic on war in the original German.
But the higher-ups seem to like what they see. Gen. David Petraeus, who commands U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, has visited Gukeisen's sector, as have Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry.
Substantial resources have flowed into Gukeisen's hands, including $850,000 in small bills for such jobs as building schools and putting carpets in the mosques of Afghans who turn against the Taliban.
Col. David Haight, Gukeisen's superior, calls him one of the brightest officers he has met.
Gukeisen wages his war across 620 restive, rugged square miles of Logar, a strategically important province bordering Kabul where he has implemented what he calls an "extreme makeover."
Rather than rigidly applying the current mantra – Clear, Hold, Build – he has held back from trying to clear large, Taliban-influenced swaths of territory, focusing instead on areas he believes are ripe for change, and then injecting aid where it counts most.
The goal was to create "security bubbles" where life could improve, so that "the rest of the districts would want to join the club," Gukeisen said.
Six months later, he says, nearly half the 400,000 people of Baraki-Barak, Charkh and Kherwar districts, along with half of Puli-a-Alam, are within the bubble. He says roadside bombs, attacks and other violent incidents have dropped by 60 percent, while intelligence from locals about the insurgents has soared by 80 percent.
Gukeisen believes rules sometimes have to be broken to get past the bureaucrats. He says he had to browbeat the purse-holders for the $850,000 and the authority to distribute it through his junior officers. But he sees a much-changed Army that is, in his sardonic wording, "beginning to gain a semblance of intelligence."
"I think the Army is coming back to the soldier as scholar and statesman," he said.
Gukeisen says his fascination with nonconventional warfare began when he was growing up in Europe with his German mother and U.S. Air Force father and hearing the stories of Dutch, Belgian and French resisters in World War II. "I realized the military does not operate in a singular world, so I started reading outside that world," he said.
His personal list of effective counterinsurgency tools includes a collection of Afghan poetry, a study of chaos theory, and Hollywood films such as Red Dawn, about American guerrillas fighting a Soviet invasion of the U.S. His approach was also influenced by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who explored man's quest for security in a violent world.
Winding up his second tour, Gukeisen is reluctant to leave things uncompleted.
"I'd like to be here another year," he said.
Dallas News
A towering, rough-and-ready 205-pounder, the officer from Carthage, N.Y., peppers his sentences with unprintables and reads Karl von Clausewitz's classic on war in the original German.
But the higher-ups seem to like what they see. Gen. David Petraeus, who commands U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, has visited Gukeisen's sector, as have Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry.
Substantial resources have flowed into Gukeisen's hands, including $850,000 in small bills for such jobs as building schools and putting carpets in the mosques of Afghans who turn against the Taliban.
Col. David Haight, Gukeisen's superior, calls him one of the brightest officers he has met.
Gukeisen wages his war across 620 restive, rugged square miles of Logar, a strategically important province bordering Kabul where he has implemented what he calls an "extreme makeover."
Rather than rigidly applying the current mantra – Clear, Hold, Build – he has held back from trying to clear large, Taliban-influenced swaths of territory, focusing instead on areas he believes are ripe for change, and then injecting aid where it counts most.
The goal was to create "security bubbles" where life could improve, so that "the rest of the districts would want to join the club," Gukeisen said.
Six months later, he says, nearly half the 400,000 people of Baraki-Barak, Charkh and Kherwar districts, along with half of Puli-a-Alam, are within the bubble. He says roadside bombs, attacks and other violent incidents have dropped by 60 percent, while intelligence from locals about the insurgents has soared by 80 percent.
Gukeisen believes rules sometimes have to be broken to get past the bureaucrats. He says he had to browbeat the purse-holders for the $850,000 and the authority to distribute it through his junior officers. But he sees a much-changed Army that is, in his sardonic wording, "beginning to gain a semblance of intelligence."
"I think the Army is coming back to the soldier as scholar and statesman," he said.
Gukeisen says his fascination with nonconventional warfare began when he was growing up in Europe with his German mother and U.S. Air Force father and hearing the stories of Dutch, Belgian and French resisters in World War II. "I realized the military does not operate in a singular world, so I started reading outside that world," he said.
His personal list of effective counterinsurgency tools includes a collection of Afghan poetry, a study of chaos theory, and Hollywood films such as Red Dawn, about American guerrillas fighting a Soviet invasion of the U.S. His approach was also influenced by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who explored man's quest for security in a violent world.
Winding up his second tour, Gukeisen is reluctant to leave things uncompleted.
"I'd like to be here another year," he said.
Dallas News
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