from the Afghan police commander of Argandab district seem premature, consider this: The NATO general in charge of the area credits a new miracle rocket with helping turn the tide and it has been in Afghanistan for a while.

The Times‘ veteran Afghanistan correspondent Carlotta Gall writes that locals “talk with awe of a powerful new rocket” that NATO’s used to batter Taliban outposts in Panjwai “with remarkable accuracy.” Nick Carter, the British two-star who commands forces in southern Afghanistan, figures they’re talking about the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, the truck-borne rocket, pictured above. He boasts that the HIMARS rockets are “extraordinarily precise; they are accurate to a meter.”

Except, the system isn’t all that new — it’s been in the Army’s arsenal since 2005. That meter-precise accuracy? Overblown. And while some of the rockets HIMARS fires are satellite-guided, the system is subject to the same targeting errors that can plague air strikes and traditional artillery. In February, a pair of HIMARS rockets killed a dozen civilians.

HIMARS use is tightly-regulated, precisely because it’s so powerful. Sitting on the back of a 5-ton truck, HIMARS is capable of firing a single, 13-foot ATACMS surface-to-surface missile 100 miles or more away. Or, it can pound up to half-dozen GPS-guided rockets in a matter of seconds at at a single target more than 40 miles in the distance; that’s more than double the range of a traditional howitzer. “The advantage of HIMARS is that is can put a lot of firepower downrange very, very quickly,” an Army fire support officer told Danger Room in February.

It’s so much firepower, in fact, that, for a while in Afghanistan, air strikes were easier to authorize than HIMARS. (At least the air assaults had overhead intelligence to back ‘em up.)

HIMARS have been used extensively in the Marines’ assault on Helmand province. WikiLeaks’ Afghan War logs recounts several fights in which the rockets were fired.

This past February, HIMARS featured in a high-profile disaster during the campaign to take the Helmand town of Marja, when one of its rockets killed 12 civilians. NATO briefly suspended its use, but it ultimately determined that the problem wasn’t with the system, but rather the human beings who operated it. Tactical intelligence misidentified a civilian residence as an insurgent compound, so the rocket slammed into the right place, but it killed the wrong people. (Afghan officials then said that some of the dead civilians were actually Taliban, but that appeared to be face-saving spin.)

There’s little doubt about HIMARS’ potency. But its novelty is in question. If the Taliban saw it in Helmand, why would they permanently flee a stronghold after seeing it in neighboring Kandahar? Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security tweets that the piece strikes him as a NATO information operation — basically, a big spin job.

Ultimately, Gall — an exceptional reporter with deep experience in Afghanistan — cites a Taliban commander who says the abandonment of Panjwai is a mere tactical retreat: “We are waiting until this force has been exhausted and has done all they are supposed to do, and later on our fighters will re-enter the area.” That’s what they did in Marja, in Sangin, and elsewhere.

It’s one thing to clear insurgents from a place, and rocket fire definitely has a role there. But it’s quite another to hold it, and the holding is the measure of durable success. Maybe NATO and Afghan forces can hold Kandahar, but that’s a long way away. And powerful, accurate rockets don’t have any relevance for keeping a city under Afghan government control.

– Noah Shachtman contributed to this piece.

See Also:

• Despite Tight Controls, U.S. Rocket Truck Kills 10 Civilians …
• Deadly Afghanistan Rocket Attack Actually Hit Its Target (Updated …
• Army Researchers: Why the Kandahar Offensive Could Backfire …
• Top Officer Fears Cyberwar, Hearts Karzai, Tweets With Help …
• Army Gearing Up for Info War (Finally)

Authors: Spencer Ackerman

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