General David Petraeus arrived in Kabul last Friday to become Commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and of US forces in Afghanistan.Confirmed by the Senate 99 to 0, he replaced General Stanley McChrystal, who was fired by President Obama after having criticized members of the administration in a reckless Rolling Stone magazine interview.
During a ceremony at NATO headquarters in Kabul on Sunday, the new commander declared, we are engaged in a tough fight. After years of war, we have arrived at a critical moment. We must demonstrate to the people and to the Taliban that Afghan and I.S.A.F. forces are here to safeguard the Afghan people, and that we are in this to win. That is our clear objective, according to the NYT.
The war is now in its ninth year, the General is commanding close to 150,000 troops (there are currently 93,000 US forces, there will be 105,000 by late Summer, and 50,000 troops from NATO and other countries); the US alone has spent over $281 billion to date, 1903 allied troops have been killed (including 1157 US soldiers), along with thousands of Afghans, and we are now being told by the US Commander that we must demonstrate to the Afghan people that we have their welfare at heart?
What have been doing these last eight years that the General felt the need to reiterate this commitment?
The admission that we have failed after eight years to make our intentions clear to the Afghans is an obvious sign that not only have we made no progress at all in Afghanistan, but are clearly failing in our mission to stabilize the country, if that is indeed our mission.
After his policy review last year, the President initially declared that he would send additional troops, and then begin a gradual withdrawal in July 2011.
That gave the Petraeus/McChrystal COIN strategy eighteen months to show results, which entailed pacifying the country significantly in order to allow the Afghan population to benefit from effective government, and entice the Taliban to lay down their weapons and negotiate a power sharing agreement with the Karzai administration.
How are we doing?
Leon Panetta, director of the CIA, implicitly recognized that the Taliban currently had no reason to cease fighting, on the contrary. We have seen no evidence that they are truly interested in reconciliation, where they would surrender their arms, where they would denounce al Qaeda, where they would really try to become part of that society. We’ve seen no evidence of that and very frankly, my view is that with regards to reconciliation, unless they’re convinced that the United States is going to win and that they’re going to be defeated, I think it’s very difficult to proceed with a reconciliation that’s going to be meaningful, he told ABC.
Things are not looking good. There’s not much sign of the turnaround that people were hoping for, Bruce Riedel, of the Brookings Institution, told the NYT.
The first offensive launched against the Taliban following the adoption of the Petraeus/McChrystal COIN strategy began in Marjah last February.
Alas, five months later, US troops still do not control the area.
In fact, the Taliban have become a more effective and efficient fighting force.
Their attacks are now more frequent and sophisticated wrote Jason Motlagh reporting from Marjah for TIME. Complex ambushes are on the rise, he added.
Furthermore, the IEDs being planted by the Taliban are bigger and bigger, according to Gunnery Sergeant Mathew Small quoted in TIME.
McChrystal himself referred to the situation in Marjah as a bleeding ulcer.
It’s harder, it’s slower than I think anyone anticipated, Leon Panetta told ABC.
That US officials should be reaching such conclusions after nearly nine years of war is dismaying. It evinces crass ignorance of the conditions in Afghanistan, the nature of the enemy we are facing and of the lessons of history.
As a result, the military campaign against a much more daunting target, Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold and the historical capital of their movement, has been postponed indefinitely. If anybody thinks Kandahar will be solved this year, they are kidding themselves, a senior military official told the NYT.
Not unsurprisingly, June was the deadliest month since the war began in late 2001.
One hundred and two NATO troops were killed, three times more than in May.
Some 322 troops have been killed since January 1st.
In 2009, 520 were killed.
This increase in violence has also affected ordinary Afghans. In the first four months of 2010, 90 civilians were killed by ISAF troops, a 250% increase over 2009.
Shootings at checkpoints and at convoys have increased significantly as well, and account for 42% of all civilian deaths and injuries.
For ordinary Afghans, such violence reveals the contempt foreign forces have for civilians. It is also telling them that foreigners believe themselves to be above the law, convinced that they can behave as they please in a land that is not theirs…
Moreover, it undermines NATO’s counterinsurgency strategy, conditioned on winning the hearts and minds of the local population.
The US and NATO’s lack of success on the battlefield coupled with their intention of initiating the withdrawal of troops starting next July has induced Afghan President Karzai to chart his own course in order to attempt to resolve the conflict.
As a result, he has begun secret negotiations with the Taliban, and been openly courting Pakistan.
The president has lost his confidence in the capability of either the coalition or his own government to protect this country. President Karzai has never announced that NATO will lose, but the way that he does not proudly own the campaign shows that he doesn’t trust it is working, Amrullah Saleh, the director of the Afghan intelligence service, told the NYT.
Mr. Saleh is a former aide to Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was known as the Lion of Panjsher. The leader of the resistance against the Soviets then the Taliban, Massoud was assassinated by agents of al Qaeda on September 9, 2001, two days before 9/11.
Like all Tajiks, Mr. Saleh does not trust either the Taliban or their Pakistani patrons, and therefore views suspiciously any negotiations with such partners. He resigned his position last month.
Hanif Atmar, interior minister, did likewise, considering that the President no longer trusted him.
In addition, the President also fired Bismullah Khan, chief of staff of the Afghan army, and also a Tajik, and a former leader of Massoud’s Northern Alliance.
President Karzai seems intent on eliminating all those who, like the Tajiks, may hinder his new policy of rapprochement with the Taliban and Pakistan.
Karzai has begun the ethnic war. The future is very dark, Mohammed Mohaqeq, a Hazara leader, told the NYT.
President Karzai seems to have concluded that since the US and NATO will eventually withdraw their forces, it is in his interest to seek support elsewhere.
Karzai told me that he can’t trust the Americans to fix the situation here… He believes they stole his legitimacy during the elections last year. And then they said publicly that they were going to leave, a Western diplomat told the NYT.
Yet, President Karzai’s new strategy is making other Afghans, those who unlike the President and the Taliban are not Pashtun, particularly nervous.
The Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara communities have not forgotten the exactions and persecutions perpetrated by the Taliban when they were in power, and have no intention of allowing President Karzai to negotiate a deal that would allow them to share power with the current government.
They have even vowed to fight if necessary to prevent the return of the Taliban.
Karzai is giving Afghanistan back to the Taliban, and he is opening up the old schisms. If he wants to bring in the Taliban, and they begin to use force, then we will go back to civil war and Afghanistan will be split, Rehman Oghly, an Uzbek member of Parliament, told the NYT.
The Tajiks, led by Massoud, refused to submit to Taliban rule and fought the Taliban government during its years in power. Their military organization, the Northern Alliance, helped the US overthrow the Taliban in the fall of 2001.
The success of President Obama’s COIN policy is conditioned on the ability of US and NATO forces to weaken the Taliban, militarily hold the areas from which the Taliban have been expulsed, then maintain law and order there so that a local civil society and economy can flourish, for the benefit of the entire local population…
A competent and dependable police force is thus crucial to allow sound local government and prevent the Taliban from returning.
The US and Germany in particular have been trying to establish a credible police force for the last eight years.
In fact, the US has already spent $6 billion on the program.
Currently, Afghanistan has some 90,000 police officers. Of those, not even 25% have received any formal training.
Western instructors are putting into place a new program designed to add an additional 30,000 by 2012.
The old system was broken. It just didn't work. Police couldn't shoot, or if they shoot, they can't hit…And then there are the reports of corruption, Marine Col. Gregory Breazile, a NATO spokesman for the training mission, told the WP.
The training course lasts eight weeks and attracts mostly rural Afghans with no education. 90% are illiterate, and 20% fail the mandatory drug test…
For the first time, the new program will include literacy classes…
The officers can't read, so when they ask for your papers, they can't read them. If you can't read an ID card, how are you capable of taking on a drug lord, an Afghan MP told the WP.
Police officers are paid about $240 a month, much less than what the Taliban offers its recruits. Since that is often insufficient to support a family, many officers extort bribes at checkpoints.
On average, 25% of the graduates of the program either quit or are killed within the first twelve months…1,600 have been killed in the past two years…
The establishment of rule of law in Afghanistan is an illusion, concluded one
German instructor.
Afghanistan’s police academy can only train 3,600 officers per year. Yet, NATO and Afghan officials estimate that the country needs 134,000 police officers trained by next July, when foreign forces should slowly start withdrawing.
We don't recognize the Afghan reality, and that's why we will fail there, one inspector told Spiegel.
Yet, before the police can move in, the Taliban must be driven out.
US and NATO forces however, have failed to make any significant headway on the battlefield against the Taliban.
In addition, the Afghan government, an essential component of the counterinsurgency strategy of which it is designed to be the principle beneficiary, is exploring other political options…
What happens to your COIN strategy when the government it is designed to buttress and reinforce no longer supports it, and has lost faith in you andyour ability to pacify the country?
Furthermore, even if the COIN strategy were to succeed, and the Taliban could be forced to negotiate on our terms, it could potentially lead to civil war, since the Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras, or close to 50% of the Afghan population reject any significant involvement of the Taliban and the Pakistanis in Afghan affairs.
In any case, the Taliban have absolutely no intention, at least for the foreseeable future, of negotiating with NATO and the US.
For, not only are they not losing the war, but they may actually prevail as time is on their side.
Should the US and NATO fail to make any significant progress on the ground in the next few months as casualties keep mounting, public pressure to withdraw the troops may prove overwhelming.
Nor are they interested, so they claim, in talking with President Karzai, as long as foreign troops remain on Afghan soil.
We do not want to talk to anyone - not to [President Hamid] Karzai, nor to any foreigners - till the foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan.
We are certain that we are winning. Why should we talk if we have the upper hand, and the foreign troops are considering withdrawal, and there are differences in the ranks of our enemies, Zabiullah Mujahedd, a Taliban spokesman, told the BBC.
Where does that leave our mission?
Even if General Petraeus succeeds in stabilizing the military situation on the ground, how do we intend to prod Afghanistan’s various fractious ethnic groups to reach some kind of political modus vivendi in order to prevent the return of civil war that ravaged the country in the 1990s? First and foremost, how can we regain President Karzai’s support?
As far as I can tell, they have no plan what to do about this. They tried tough love; that didn’t work. They tried love bombing, and that didn’t work. The thinking now is, we’ll just muddle through. But that’s not a strategy, a senior Democratic Congressional aide told the NYT.
Have we not been muddling through for the better part of the last eight years, which accounts for our current predicament?
In the end, is it not probably the best we can do and hope for?
If so, why are we still in Afghanistan?
Our COIN strategy is in the process of disintegrating because it was an overweening project from the outset.
Was it wise to envisage that we could resurrect Afghanistan, and build a modern, stable and democratic state able to fend for itself?
Should we not have had narrower, more modest ambitions?
The only way in which we could move beyond the counter-insurgency theory, or the hundred other theories which buttress and justify the Afghan war, is by rejecting their most basic underlying premises and objectives. Instead of trying to produce an alternative theory (on how to defeat the Taliban, create an effective, legitimate and stable Afghan state, stabilize Pakistan and ensure that al-Qaida could never again threaten the United States) we need to understand that however desirable such things might be, they are not things that we -- as foreigners -- can do, wrote Rory Stewart, an Afghan expert and British Conservative MP, in Spiegel.
Were our initial objectives the byproduct of excessive idealism, or ignorance and arrogance?
In the end, it matters little.
The damage is already done.
The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people. The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense, Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel who attended West Point with McChrystal, told Rolling Stone.
As a result of these developments, opposition to the war is growing, including within the US Congress.
Last week, the $33 billion bill presented by the Obama administration to finance the troop increase passed by the smallest of margins, 215 to 210. Had not a host of domestic spending projects been added to the bill, it might never have been approved.
Obviously, a lot of people are understandably anxious. The sustainability of this war is in some doubt, Michael O’Hanlon, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution, told the Washington Independent.
It’s a fool’s errand. Every dollar we spend in Afghanistan, every life we waste there, is a waste. … What makes us think, what arrogance gives us the right to assume that we can succeed where the Moguls, the British, the Soviets, failed, asked Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) at a press conference last week.
Rep. Tim Johnson (R-Ill.) also condemned the bill and the project it intends to finance.
We cannot force a culture to accept our values, and we cannot impose Western democracy on a people who don’t understand or accept it and whose leadership is corrupt and antidemocratic beyond repair. And we cannot continue to spend the billions and, arguably, trillions of dollars of the hardworking men and women in this country in a venture that has no objective, no end game, and no proximate connection to the well-being of our Nation, he told the House...
We have obviously lost our way in Afghanistan.
What is our mission?
The fundamental purpose, the mission that the president has laid out is that we have to go after Al Qaeda. We’ve got to disrupt and dismantle Al Qaeda and their militant allies so they never attack this country again, CIA Director Leon Panetta reminded us last month.
Does that necessarily entail occupying a fractious, third world, Muslim country with 150,000 troops at the cost of thousands of lives and billions of dollars a year?
We have been in Afghanistan for nearly nine years, and as Petraeus himself implicitly conceded, have accomplished next to nothing there.
Why should we suddenly find the key to stabilizing a country we have been unable to pacify for the last eight years?
Afghanistan is not in our vital interest-there’s nothing for us there, concluded Marc Sageman, formerly of the CIA.
Why are we still there?
(the photograph above can be found here)
