Afghan quagmire

The new U.S. commander's claim that the Americans will win the war in Afghanistan before withdrawing in 2011 is received with scepticism.

GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS formally assumed charge as the new commander of the United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) forces in Afghanistan on July 4. He takes over command under controversial circumstances as his predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, was booted out by President Barack Obama for acts that bordered on insubordination. His leadership of the coalition forces also comes at a time when the Taliban seems to have taken the military and political initiative in that country.

The General seems to have acknowledged the facts on the ground. While taking over command in Kabul, he told NATO and Afghan officials present at the ceremony that they were witnessing a critical moment in the country and that the U.S. was engaged in a contest of wills. He tried to reassure his audience and sent out a message to the wider world that the U.S. was in Afghanistan to win the war against the resurgent Taliban.

At the same time, Petraeus was particular to emphasise that he endorsed Obama's plans to withdraw the U.S. forces from Afghanistan by the middle of 2011.

Afghanistan-watchers are, however, sceptical about the Obama administration's ability to turn the military tide within a year. An increasingly emboldened Taliban has, in recent weeks, staged attacks on high-profile U.S. targets, including a military base. The death toll among NATO troops in Afghanistan in June alone was over 100, the highest casualty figure recorded in a single month. More than half of those killed were American servicemen. Petraeus said the Obama administration was not surprised by the rise in the casualty figures among the forces. According to him, the sudden rise in the number of deaths was connected to the military surge.

Many military analysts are of the view that the much vaunted military surge under McChrystal against the Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan has failed to achieve its goals. An illustration of the Taliban blowback was the recent incident in Marjah, the epicentre of the military surge. When the U.S. Special Envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, and the U.S. Ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, visited Marjah in late June to meet with local leaders, they were greeted with small-arms fire from Taliban fighters in the vicinity. According to reports, three suicide-bombers were also waiting in the vicinity to target the American officials, but their bombs went off prematurely.

Offensive to subdue the Taliban

The Obama administration had decided in February to implement an Iraq-style military surge in Afghanistan. The sharp increase in U.S. military activity is scheduled to last for 18 months. The plan was to put the Taliban militarily on the back foot and then force it to the negotiating table. Things have not apparently gone according to the script. Operation Moshtarak, launched in February, has not succeeded in getting either Marjah or Helmand in southern Afghanistan out of Taliban control. McChrystal, before his departure, had described the Marjah campaign as a bleeding ulcer and warned NATO Defence Ministers at a conference not to expect any significant progress in Afghanistan in the next six months. He described the Afghan resistance as a resilient and growing insurgency.

The general was particularly upset that the Obama administration did not give him the green signal to launch a frontal attack on Kandahar the Taliban's spiritual capital. With the numbers of American troops surging over 100,000, there is likely to be one last massive military onslaught to subdue the Taliban. This would mean the loss of more innocent lives in a country that has seen little peace since the 1980s. In the last 10 years, U.S. air strikes and drone attacks on wedding parties, funeral congregations and transport buses have killed thousands of innocent civilians.

The Afghan resistance has met the U.S. military surge with a counter-surge. Unlike in Iraq, where the Bush-era surge was deemed as successful, the U.S. is finding to its chagrin that in Afghanistan the situation on the ground is more complicated. Petraeus is the architect of the U.S. military's current counter-insurgency programme (COIN) in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The surge in Iraq mainly targeted the Sunni insurgents in central Iraq. The Bush administration had successfully bought off key Sunni tribes. This strategy has apparently failed in Afghanistan where loyalty among Pashtuns and the desire to rid the country of foreign invaders have evidently triumphed over tribal rivalries.

The surge in southern Afghanistan seems to have only galvanised the Taliban, which has pushed its forces into new areas, including the north, where their presence was minimal. Attacks on American soldiers in the east have shown a marked increase after the surge.

Talks with insurgents

President Hamid Karzai had cautioned the Obama administration against the military surge from the outset, saying that it would further alienate the populace. For the last couple of months he has been repeatedly advocating talks with our angry brothers the Taliban. Al Jazeera reported in the last week of June that Karzai had a face-to-face meeting with Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban leader who is said to have the backing of the Pakistani military. According to reports in the Afghan and Pakistani media, the meeting was personally brokered by the Pakistan Army chief, Gen. Pervez Kiyani. But the Afghan government has denied reports about Karzai's secret meeting with Haqqani.

The Afghan Taliban has been loudly insisting that it is amenable to talks only after the foreign forces have departed. Karzai and the Pakistani government are, however, known to be working overtime to reach a negotiated settlement with the Taliban.

It will be a win-win situation for Pakistan if the Taliban is brought to the negotiating table. Pakistan hopes that if there is a negotiated settlement to the conflict, it can regain its strategic depth in the region and keep its historical adversary, India, at bay. The Pakistani media have reported that Islamabad has presented a road map to the Afghan President for a political settlement with the Haqqani faction of the Taliban.

A U.S. State Department spokesman acknowledged that the Obama administration was aware that the Afghan and Pakistan governments were holding direct talks with the insurgent groups. He said the U.S. wanted Pakistan to play a supportive role in the broader peace process.

Islamabad seems to be playing a key role once again in Kabul as the U.S. starts its preparations to wind down its military presence in Afghanistan. In early June, New Delhi agreed to discuss issues relating to Afghanistan with Islamabad. Islamabad has always been insisting that only Pakistan is in a position to bring about a negotiated settlement in Afghanistan. U.S. officials have said that Pakistan has been helping some sections of the Taliban and other Islamic militant groups in an effort to counter Indian influence in Afghanistan and to ensure that a post-U.S. Afghanistan reverts to a traditional pro-Islamabad stance. Karzai, who until the other day was accusing Pakistan of interfering in Afghanistan's internal affairs, has today become noticeably warm towards Islamabad and Beijing, while distancing himself from New Delhi.

Senior anti-Taliban officials in the Karzai government, such as Amrullah Saleh, the intelligence chief, and Hanif Amir, the Interior Minister, resigned in early June, reportedly in protest against Karzai's decision to open channels of communications with the Taliban and other resistance groups. An end to the conflict in Afghanistan could help the Pakistan government end the spate of terror attacks on its own territory. Terrorism in the country has been spawned by the events in Afghanistan and the counter-insurgency methods adopted by the U.S., which has resulted in huge collateral damage to Pakistanis living across the Durand Line.

But hopes for an early peace deal in Afghanistan could be misplaced. In the last week of June, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief, Leon Panetta, while acknowledging that Islamabad was trying to broker a deal with the Taliban, said the militants had not shown any real interest in reconciliation. Panetta admitted that the militants would not negotiate until they were convinced that they were on the losing side of the war. I think that the Taliban is obviously engaged in greater violence right now. They're doing more on IEDs [improvised explosive devices]. They are going after our troops. There is no question about that, Panetta told the American television network ABC.

The steady stream of announcements by NATO countries that they are planning to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan is encouraging news for the Taliban. British Prime Minister David Cameron said he wanted his country's troops out completely by 2015. Dutch voters have brought down a government on the issue. German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor von und zu Guttenberg warned in the last week of June that NATO countries needed to scale down their goals dramatically in Afghanistan. He even questioned the rationale for the launching of the Afghan invasion in 2001. He said there was an urgent need for NATO to lay out strict criteria before embarking on future wars. This, he said, was essential to prevent the organisation from being committed to open-ended wars without defined political goals. Germany has 5,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, the third largest military contingent after the U.S. and Britain.

Ann Jones, an American writer who was recently embedded with the U.S. troops in Afghanistan fighting on the front lines, has succinctly summed up the American dilemma.

If you spend time in Afghanistan, evidence of failure is all around you, including those millions of American tax-payers' dollars that are paid to Afghan security contractors [and Karzai relatives] and then handed over to insurgents to buy protection for U.S. supply convoys travelling on the U.S.-built, but Taliban-controlled, roads. Strategy doesn't get much worse than that: financing both sides and every brigand in between, in hopes of a happier ending one day, she wrote in a recent article.