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Nearly six years after it began, the war in Afghanistan is a draw. The Taliban guerrillas and their al Qaeda allies can't defeat the U.S.-led coalition in conventional battle, but the coalition doesn't have enough troops on the ground to wage a successful counterinsurgency.
The U.S. is sure to send in more troops at some point. Currently, the U.S., NATO and non-NATO allies have about 51,000 soldiers to police a country nearly one and a half times as large as Iraq. About 25,000 of them are U.S. troops. Even the staunchest congressional critics of the war in Iraq recognize the importance of winning the war in Afghanistan and favor shifting U.S. troops there as the U.S. presence in Iraq is reduced. But the 15-month limit on combat tours that will force the U.S. to bring troops home from the Iraq surge to rest and retrain next spring and summer will prevent them from being immediately deployed to Afghanistan.
Many of the remaining coalition forces -- most notably Germans, French and Italians -- are barred from deployment in combat by their home governments. Exceptions include the contingents from the United Kingdom, Canada and the Netherlands, which have engaged the Taliban in fierce fighting in southern Afghanistan. But the Canadians and the Dutch have each taken heavy casualties, with the result that domestic pressure is building in both countries to bring their troops home. The Afghan National Army and police forces remain understrength and are increasingly the targets of suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices as the Taliban draw lessons from the war in Iraq.
The Taliban have been stepping up operations, not just in the south and east of the country where they remain strongest, but also in territory previously considered secure, to the north and west of Kabul. Indeed, the notion of any territory in Afghanistan being securely held by either coalition forces or the Taliban is misleading. Afghanistan is so large and the terrain so rugged that large parts of the country rarely see a regular military presence of either side. And the tribal nature of Afghan society makes the situation even more fluid.
"Afghanistan is such a mishmash of tribal loyalties that you'll see a [tribal] group loyal to the Taliban the day it passes through town and loyal to NATO the day it passes through town," says Nate Hughes, a military analyst for private intelligence firm Stratfor.
Several factors further complicate coalition efforts to break the Taliban insurgency. The Kabul-based Afghan national government remains highly corrupt and ineffective at providing basic services, which costs both it and the U.S. support from the Afghan people. The Taliban are reaping huge profits from the production and smuggling of illegal drugs as opium farming flourishes, particularly in the group's stronghold in the southern province of Helmand. The ties between Pashtun tribesmen on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border not only enable al Qaeda and the Taliban to use Pakistan as a safe haven from coalition attacks but also provide fertile recruiting ground for the Taliban to replenish their own forces. Meanwhile, the Pakistani army and intelligence services have variously shown themselves as unwilling or unable to fight the Taliban effectively on their own side of the border.
The delicate political climate in Pakistan doesn't help. An agreement just reached between General Pervez Musharraf and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto will allow the latter to return from exile later this month and run to reclaim her former office. That will ease relations between Musharraf and Bhutto's followers in the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), averting the threat that PPP deputies would join 80 other opposition legislators in resigning rather than participate in this weekend's presidential election.
The end result is likely to be another term as president for Musharraf, with the general following his reelection by shedding his uniform and governing as a civilian. But the move won't quell protests by those opposition parties not reconciled to Musharraf's continued rule. Nor will it transform Pakistan into a civilian democracy. Pakistan's military will retain a strong influence in the nation's government, just as it has during previous interludes of civilian rule over the past three decades. At best, what will emerge is a power sharing arrangement between Musharraf, his successor as army chief and a civilian prime minister.
Whatever government emerges after Pakistan's election this weekend won't reverse Islamabad's policy of supporting the U.S. war against the Taliban. But instead of dealing with one individual, the U.S. will have to deal with multiple Pakistani institutions, making for a more complex process of obtaining Pakistani assistance for any specific operations against the Taliban or al Qaeda.
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POSTED BY: Andrew C. Schneider (October 08, 2007 05:32 PM)
Andrew Schneider of Kiplinger here, responding to Mr. Starr's comment. At Kiplinger, we strive to be as objective as possible. Our purpose is neither to dishearten nor to embolden but to present the facts as we have come to understand them through our own reporting and to render our forecasts on the course events are likely to take as a result. Having said all this, it is true that the Taliban did rule the bulk of Afghanistan for several years prior to the U.S./NATO invasion. It is true that the U.S. and allied forces expelled the Taliban from the seats of government and most of the country. It is also true, however, that since the end of conventional fighting, the Taliban have returned in significant numbers to the south and east of the country. Neither the US forces, NATO forces nor allied Afghan forces have been able to break them or convince them to disarm. The U.S. is capable of holding the reinvigorated Taliban at bay as long as its troops remain in the country. However, it does not have enough troops to win an outright victory. This is not merely Kiplinger's stance. Rather, it comes straight from the US Army's new Counterinsurgency Field Manual. According to this book, waging a successful counterinsurgency requires the use of 25 soldiers per 1000 residents of a country. The current population of Afghanistan is roughly 32 million. Using the Counterinsurgency Field Manual's own guidelines, waging a successful counterinsurgency in Afghanistan requires close to 798,000 troops. Under the circumstances, the U.S. is doing extremely well to be fighting the war in Afghanistan to a draw.
POSTED BY: Erich (October 08, 2007 07:44 PM)
Dan,
I think draw is a very accurate way of describing the situation now. If history is a guide any force that takes Afg. usually will do quite easily, the hard part is holding (and converting the population) it. It was true with the Russians in the 80's and is true today. If we were winning we could draw back troops without negative impact, nothing could be farther from the truth, the day we leave, the taliban will take over and you'll have executions in the soccer stadium again.
I agree with you John, this in NOT a conventional war, and should be fought as such. Vietnam was treated this way for years and in the end we ran away.
We need more not less troops in Afg if we want to win, but with most of our troops committed to the pissing match in iraq, where are those troop going to come from?
POSTED BY: Eyecare (October 09, 2007 06:48 AM)
This article is closer to the truth than many of us would like to see. Despite the overwhelming superiority of our military we are unable to bring all of Afghanistan into our fold, just as many invaders in the past have been unable to do. The biggest problem we face isn't al Qaeda or the Taliban but ourselves. Our lack of basic understanding of the how their society operates and our presumtions on their reaction to our offer of bringing "democracy" to their country undermines our efforts to bring stability to this area of the world. The success of our operations in Afghanistan are dependent on the support we get from the various tribal leaders. The Taliban know this and use this to their advantage. It is highly unlikely that we will "win" any conflict in this region without overwhelming support of the local populace. We will continue to kill "insurgents" and they will continue to kill our soldiers until one of us gets tired and withdraws. Whether we like it or not this is turning out to be another Vietnam. In the end it will be up to the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan to determine their future and for the more moderate elements of the Moslem world to reign in their fundamentalists.
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