An Afghan Snapshot
Note: Here's my latest submission for my parallel writing endeavour. Regular posting for AMF will resume tomorrow.
As operations in Iraq wane, and operations in Afghanistan seem poised to surge, it's helpful to take a snapshot view of the state of affairs in Afghanistan. While the Taliban appears to have the upper hand, a great challenge for Western and Afghan security forces has the potential to become a crushing defeat for insurgent forces - if the West has the resolve to fight.
By most accounts, the Iraq War is drawing to a close. Although small, sporadic instances of violence continue, the distributed security provided by the surge strategy has allowed for previously unimaginable gains. Iraq's infrastructure and logistical networks are being regenerated, its citizens are returning from foreign havens, shops are reopening, and the Iraqi security forces gain strength and experience by the week. While the forces of al Qaeda in Iraq are making their final stand in Mosul, American and Iraqi forces are simultaneously crushing them in what will likely be the final regional conflict of the war. As al Qaeda collapses, and various other Sunni groups (the Sons of Iraq, and the other elements of the Awakening Movement) are drawn into the employ of the Iraqi government, the justification for Shia opposition militias continues to wane.
The majority of Iraq's provinces have been turned over to Iraqi control, with the decreasing numbers of multi-national coalition forces providing guidance and assistance to military and civil authorities. A police state that was the tool and mouthpiece of a single tyrant has been replaced with a free and democratic government; the new incarnation of Iraq is formidable enough that its leaders have essentially completed the process of negotiating a timeline for the withdrawal of Iraq's liberators. Not only are these are the signs of success for the coalition and for Iraq itself, they are also simultaneous signs that the strategic wager that the greater al Qaeda network made on Iraq has failed.
Unfortunately, the first front in the civilized world's fight against global terrorism has reignited. After the nearly instantaneous collapse of the Taliban at the end of 2001, Afghanistan enjoyed several years of relative calm after thirty years of war. Sporadic violence continued, but these attacks were seen as little more than the death throes of a handful of hangers-on. However, the Taliban eventually regrouped by using the nearly unnavigable, and completely ungovernable Pakistani frontier as a safe haven to regenerate itself. Taliban leaders have forged alliances with both sympathetic and indifferent groups, and every stunning military defeat suffered by Taliban insurgents is met with an equally stunning strategic victory on the public relations battlefield of the international media.
The most significant challenge in Afghanistan is a lack of combat troops. The majority of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has been provided and overseen by NATO. The Afghan war has strained NATO, both the alliance itself and the troops charged with bringing the insurgency under control. In a recent article, independent reporter Michael Yon pointed out that the West (and by extension the Afghans) has been demonstrating for months now that the NATO alliance, as a whole, doesn't have the resolve to win against the Taliban.
The German Bundeswehr serves as an extreme indicator of NATO as a whole. In October, news sources revealed that Germany deployed its special forces to Afghanistan for three years without sending them on a single mission. Another recent article cited figures that the German contingent in Afghanistan, about 3600 soldiers, consumes more than one million liters of alcohol per year (in direct contrast to American and British troops, who are strictly forbidden from consuming alcohol while deployed). Last week, an article in the Times of London cited a German study saying that soldiers were more likely to be overweight than German citizens on average. German medevac pilots are also required to withdraw from operating before tea time, which at one point forced Norwegian troops to abandon their Afghan National Army partners during combat operations against the Taliban.
Unfortunately, the German troops are not alone in their adversity. Several months ago, when a handful of heroic (but poorly equipped and reinforced) French troops were slaughtered by the Taliban outside Kabul, the French almost pulled their entire contingent from Afghanistan. While the Italians pledged in May to take on more dangerous missions, their patrols in relatively stable areas have yet to be expanded. To this day, nearly all of the fighting in Afghanistan is carried out by American, British, Canadian, Danish, and Dutch troops, with Australian special forces carrying out some additional missions. Conventional Australian infantry troops have complained about battlefield restrictions that prevent them from fighting alongside their colleagues from other nations. The Japanese contribution to the Afghan mission, a naval refueling mission in the Indian Ocean, has been so controversial among the people that the Japanese parliament has struggled several times to extend the mandate. Even Canada, a nation that has allowed its troops to do their heroic duty while others watched from the safety of their forward operating bases, plans to withdraw nearly all of its troops by 2011, and threatened to do so earlier if additional troops were not provided by other NATO countries. According to Yon:
The inclination of many is to blame the troops themselves, and that may be appropriate in some isolated cases. However, if a German citizen enlists in what is now an all-volunteer force, and volunteers for and completes training with the Kommando Spezialkräfte, chances are that he wants to put his training to use. The complaints from the regular Aussie combat units should serve as an undeniable demonstration of this sentiment. The restrictions placed on most nations' ISAF troops reflects the will of their respective national legislatures, which in turn reflect the sentiments of the electorate. The inferences one could make from this are potentially staggering.
A lackluster military response from NATO and others has even entered into international politics. The Australian government has described the Western response as "underwhelming," and NATO commander General John Craddock said that the NATO alliance was "wavering" on Afghanistan (Guardian, Times). According to a leaked French memo, a British diplomat claimed that the Afghan mission is doomed.
Although many of those troops that are no longer needed in Iraq could potentially be redeployed to Afghanistan, and many of the US Marines who were no longer needed in now-stable Anbar already have been, this move comes relatively late in the game. Due to the limitations placed on various ISAF contingents, the coalition has had to rely heavily on air strikes during the last several years. In a counterinsurgency (COIN) environment, even precision air strikes tend to be too imprecise. This reliance on combat air has resulted in a growing number of civilian deaths, jeopardizing the previously strong cooperation and resolve of the Afghan people. According to the US Army/Marine Corps COIN Manual:
These imperatives require a shift in tactics away from combat air, and toward the type of COIN approach that worked for coalition forces in places like Fallujah, Basra, and Baghdad. However, such a strategy can not be fully implemented when the bulk of the military force in Afghanistan is not allowed to provide security in the places where it is needed most. The current situation is a repetitive, degenerative cycle: security is limited by troop shortages in the areas of Afghanistan contested by the Taliban (mostly the Pashtun regions abutting the porous border with Pakistan), allowing the Taliban enough freedom of maneuver to carry out their operations, which further compromises security, resulting in further restrictions on combat troops. According to the COIN Manual:
By deploying more troops within rural Afghan population centers in order to protect the people, collect intelligence, and unequivocally demonstrate the resolve and good intentions of the ISAF/Afghan government mandate, the coalition could deal a severe blow to to the Taliban and consolidate the force-on-force military victory of 2001/'02 with a COIN victory in 2010/'11. The most crucial limitation of ISAF in Afghanistan is that of trained, equipped, combat-capable troops to provide this security, and that shortage is the primary reason (and the contributor to many secondary reasons) for the Taliban resurgence in the last several years.
Because the coalition, and the Afghans by extension, appear on the surface to be losing against the Taliban, many in both Afghanistan and the world at large have encouraged a diplomatic dialogue with the Taliban in recent months. The Taliban, however, appear mostly uninterested in negotiating. A great deal was made of recent secret and/or informal meetings between Taliban-affiliated officials and elements of the Karzai government, as hosted by the Saudis (Wired, BBC, UPI, CNN). However, some analysts have pointed out that the Taliban officials (most notably the former Foreign Minister Wakil Mutawakkil) have no authority to negotiate on behalf of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and his lieutenants. President Hamid Karzai's recent immunity pledge to Mullah Omar in exchange for negotiations was immediately dismissed by the Taliban. A November column by RAND analyst Cheryl Benard explained why near term negotiations would be a fruitless endeavour.
For the same reason that negotiating with Iran has proved futile over the last several years, negotiations with the Taliban at present would be pointless because the Taliban would essentially approach negotiations from a position of strength. One group that understands this is Afghan women, a group of whom met with Karzai in October to decry any negotiations with the Taliban. Indications are that most Afghan citizens have no desire to return to Taliban rule - the apparent apathy of some results from their belief that NATO and the West lack the resolve to comprehensively defeat the Taliban. Unfortunately, the West has done less than it should to allay these fears.
Westerners, particularly Europeans and American liberals, prefer diplomatic engagement to military engagement - essentially, diplomacy for the sake of diplomacy. While diplomacy is undeniably effective under some circumstances, many tend to forget that diplomacy only works in one's favor when a nation or coalition has overwhelming military force - a lesson learned by the Japanese in World War II, when America's only term for preventing the impending invasion was Japan's unconditional surrender. In other words, talking only works when used as a preventative or alternative to the use of force - a prevention/alternative that the Taliban has never seemed especially concerned over. As military theorists from Sun Tzu to Machiavelli to von Clausewitz have all pointed out, diplomacy and war are two sides of the same coin, and negotiating with the Taliban right now would amount to negotiations of a surrender on the part of a free and democratic Afghan government, and the ISAF coalition.
Efforts against Taliban logistics have also been stymied by an unlikely source of opposition: Iran. The Iranian regime has a history of financing terrorist groups in an effort to disrupt the balance of power in neighboring or hostile nations: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the Jaish al Mahdi in Iraq, just to name a few. In a surprising turn of events, substantial evidence implicates Iran in supplying the Taliban with arms (AP, BBC, BBC, Reuters). A recent BBC radio interview with a Taliban fighter in western Pakistan noted the ability of imported Kalashnikov rifles to fire rifle grenades as proof that they were manufactured in Iran - Kalashnikovs manufactured in other nations lack this capability. Signs are also accumulating that indicate assistance for the Taliban from elements of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
There are several possible reasons why Iran might supply weapons to a group that it nearly went to war with. Iran might be attempting to keep Afghanistan unstable, in a bid to prevent another strong Sunni neighbor from rising up on its eastern border. A sort of "cold war" between Iran and its regional rival, Saudi Arabia, is well documented; and with Iran's support for the Jaish al Mahdi having failed to stop the stabilization of Iraq, the Iranian regime is faced with the potential for strong, opposition neighbors with strong Western ties on all sides. The Iranian government could also be motivated purely by its hatred of the West, taking cues from the Soviet Union in Vietnam and the United States in Afghanistan by supplying arms in a sort of proxy war against a more loathed enemy than the former enemy that it now supports. As Iran's border with Pakistan lies in the wild Balochistan region, interdicting such supply shipments as they pass into Taliban-controlled Pakistani territory will remain difficult.
An earlier quote from an article by Michael Yon noted the successful turbine delivery to the Kajaki Dam. Yon, one of the two best independent journalist working in today's theaters of war (the other being Michael Totten), has a truly outstanding dispatch describing the mission by a mostly British force. Missions such as these are evidence of real success in Afghanistan - the very type of successful COIN operations that will build critical infrastructure, which will in turn build trust among the Afghan people, which will in turn increase their cooperation with ISAF forces, which will increase security in contested areas, which will consolidate the Taliban's defeat. In COIN operations, not only does every action cause a reaction, many actions cause chain reactions, for better or for worse. The Kajaki Dam triumph is one operation that will, in theory at least, cause a chain reaction for the better. They key is generating enough simultaneous positive reactions and chain reactions to compliment it, thus turning pyrrhic victories into decisive ones.
The Kajaki Dam mission received a great deal of press once it had been completed. One of the success stories that continues to go underreported is that of the fight against Afghan opium cultivation. The opium and heroin trade has thrived in Afghanistan for decades, and the thriving drug trade was tolerated by the Taliban regime until mid-2001, when Mullah Omar denounced opium cultivation as "un-Islamic" and outlawed it - in order to inflate the value of Taliban opium stockpiles, according to some analysts. With the collapse of Taliban power in late 2001, Mullah Omar and his subordinates co-opted opium as a cash crop of convenience. The result was that opium became the Taliban's economic "center of gravity" - a military term originating from the works of Carl von Clausewitz that is used to refer to "those characteristics, capabilities, or locations from which a military force derives its freedom of action, physical strength, or will to fight." As goes the opium, so goes the Taliban.
Beyond the simple dilemma of denying opium profits to a cash hungry insurgent militia (and the additional issue of the international drug war), opium presents additional challenges to counterinsurgent forces. In a barren country like Afghanistan, opium is easy for subsistence farmers to grow and sell for enough cash to keep their families alive for one more year. In addition, the Taliban pressures Afghan farmers to grow opium with threats of violence if they fail to comply. To simply destroy the opium fields in ways similar to the defoliation of the jungles of Vietnam would compromise both the economic and physical security of the Afghan people, alienating the very citizens that the Afghan government must support in order to build legitimacy. Although some have suggested refocusing the Afghan opium trade for pharmaceutical purposes, many believe that the Afghan government lacks the resources to police the opium fields, leaving the potential for legalized poppy fields to continue financing the Taliban. As a result, the opium conundrum has haunted ISAF and the Afghans for years.
Despite a bumper opium crop this year, Afghan opium cultivation has actually declined considerably in 2008 (BBC, BBC, AP, Times). Beyond the coalition information operations, several items have contributed to this decline. One of these has been the rise in Afghan cultivation of a trendy fruit: pomegranates (Guardian, AP).
Another unlikely contributor to the fall of Afghan opium crops is high fuel prices. Although the world has seen recent relief from the collapse of petroleum prices, previously skyrocketing fuel prices led to a wholesale increase in food prices worldwide. Food price increases have led Afghan farmers to swap opium for wheat, both for subsistence and as a cash crop (Guardian, AP). It will take time before the world will see what impact this will have on the Taliban, but conventional wisdom indicates that as the Afghan opium supplies wither, so too will the Taliban's cash flow.
In addition, several small but important victories have resulted from the concerted efforts of the handful of nations that are holding the line in Afghanistan. In recent months, fewer foreign insurgents have entered Afghanistan due to better efforts to shore up the porous border with Pakistan. Afghanistan is beginning to function on a regional level, evidenced by the Afghan government's efforts with Iran to set up a joint transportation venture. And, in signs that the Afghan government is coming into its own on the international stage, Afghanistan bested Syria by securing a contested seat on the IAEA board.
The Iraq War has taught better than any other recent event that international media outlets have a vested interest in reporting bad news. Despite instances of bad news coming out of Afghanistan at this moment in time, the Afghan central government, the Afghan security forces, and the ISAF coalition continue to make progress. According to the aformentioned Michael Yon:
The fight in Afghanistan - a fight for freedom and safety, and against terrorism - is still a fight that the Afghans and ISAF can win. It will take a continued commitment, and a concerted effort at implementing counterinsurgent doctrine, but the Afghans want the Taliban defeated - they have no desire to return to lives supervised by extremist Taliban thugs. Whether one's motivation is global security, human rights, or humanitarianism, civilized nations should do everything in their power to shore up support for this critical international endeavour.
As operations in Iraq wane, and operations in Afghanistan seem poised to surge, it's helpful to take a snapshot view of the state of affairs in Afghanistan. While the Taliban appears to have the upper hand, a great challenge for Western and Afghan security forces has the potential to become a crushing defeat for insurgent forces - if the West has the resolve to fight.
By most accounts, the Iraq War is drawing to a close. Although small, sporadic instances of violence continue, the distributed security provided by the surge strategy has allowed for previously unimaginable gains. Iraq's infrastructure and logistical networks are being regenerated, its citizens are returning from foreign havens, shops are reopening, and the Iraqi security forces gain strength and experience by the week. While the forces of al Qaeda in Iraq are making their final stand in Mosul, American and Iraqi forces are simultaneously crushing them in what will likely be the final regional conflict of the war. As al Qaeda collapses, and various other Sunni groups (the Sons of Iraq, and the other elements of the Awakening Movement) are drawn into the employ of the Iraqi government, the justification for Shia opposition militias continues to wane.
The majority of Iraq's provinces have been turned over to Iraqi control, with the decreasing numbers of multi-national coalition forces providing guidance and assistance to military and civil authorities. A police state that was the tool and mouthpiece of a single tyrant has been replaced with a free and democratic government; the new incarnation of Iraq is formidable enough that its leaders have essentially completed the process of negotiating a timeline for the withdrawal of Iraq's liberators. Not only are these are the signs of success for the coalition and for Iraq itself, they are also simultaneous signs that the strategic wager that the greater al Qaeda network made on Iraq has failed.
Unfortunately, the first front in the civilized world's fight against global terrorism has reignited. After the nearly instantaneous collapse of the Taliban at the end of 2001, Afghanistan enjoyed several years of relative calm after thirty years of war. Sporadic violence continued, but these attacks were seen as little more than the death throes of a handful of hangers-on. However, the Taliban eventually regrouped by using the nearly unnavigable, and completely ungovernable Pakistani frontier as a safe haven to regenerate itself. Taliban leaders have forged alliances with both sympathetic and indifferent groups, and every stunning military defeat suffered by Taliban insurgents is met with an equally stunning strategic victory on the public relations battlefield of the international media.
The most significant challenge in Afghanistan is a lack of combat troops. The majority of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has been provided and overseen by NATO. The Afghan war has strained NATO, both the alliance itself and the troops charged with bringing the insurgency under control. In a recent article, independent reporter Michael Yon pointed out that the West (and by extension the Afghans) has been demonstrating for months now that the NATO alliance, as a whole, doesn't have the resolve to win against the Taliban.
The German Bundeswehr serves as an extreme indicator of NATO as a whole. In October, news sources revealed that Germany deployed its special forces to Afghanistan for three years without sending them on a single mission. Another recent article cited figures that the German contingent in Afghanistan, about 3600 soldiers, consumes more than one million liters of alcohol per year (in direct contrast to American and British troops, who are strictly forbidden from consuming alcohol while deployed). Last week, an article in the Times of London cited a German study saying that soldiers were more likely to be overweight than German citizens on average. German medevac pilots are also required to withdraw from operating before tea time, which at one point forced Norwegian troops to abandon their Afghan National Army partners during combat operations against the Taliban.
Unfortunately, the German troops are not alone in their adversity. Several months ago, when a handful of heroic (but poorly equipped and reinforced) French troops were slaughtered by the Taliban outside Kabul, the French almost pulled their entire contingent from Afghanistan. While the Italians pledged in May to take on more dangerous missions, their patrols in relatively stable areas have yet to be expanded. To this day, nearly all of the fighting in Afghanistan is carried out by American, British, Canadian, Danish, and Dutch troops, with Australian special forces carrying out some additional missions. Conventional Australian infantry troops have complained about battlefield restrictions that prevent them from fighting alongside their colleagues from other nations. The Japanese contribution to the Afghan mission, a naval refueling mission in the Indian Ocean, has been so controversial among the people that the Japanese parliament has struggled several times to extend the mandate. Even Canada, a nation that has allowed its troops to do their heroic duty while others watched from the safety of their forward operating bases, plans to withdraw nearly all of its troops by 2011, and threatened to do so earlier if additional troops were not provided by other NATO countries. According to Yon:
Most of our allies are not very helpful. With the exception of the British, Canadians, Dutch, and a few others such as the Aussies, we are not fighting this with an "A-team" of international allies. With a few exceptions, our allies on the ground are comprised of several dozen countries that mostly refuse to fight. The bulk of NATO amounts to little more than a "Taliban piñata." The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is proving nearly worthless and provides no credible threat to armed opposition groups (AOGs) in Afghanistan. Most of the NATO member countries seem to break out in a cold sweat at the mere mention of "Taliban." They piled in when the war looked easy and largely humanitarian. But now that it’s getting harder and more dangerous, they would like to pile out.
Success or failure in Afghanistan depends on the handful of countries that step up — and a multi-pronged, combat/political/nation-building strategy. The Brits field excellent soldiers but are short of enabling equipment, such as helicopters, armor, and UAVs, which could greatly enhance their combat effectiveness. Nevertheless, an outstanding British-led operation to deliver a 200-ton hydroelectric turbine to the Kajaki Dam could eventually deliver electricity to 1.8 million people. This dam, with its potential to bring light, heat, and the ability to begin industrializing, is a true and serious victory for the good guys.
The inclination of many is to blame the troops themselves, and that may be appropriate in some isolated cases. However, if a German citizen enlists in what is now an all-volunteer force, and volunteers for and completes training with the Kommando Spezialkräfte, chances are that he wants to put his training to use. The complaints from the regular Aussie combat units should serve as an undeniable demonstration of this sentiment. The restrictions placed on most nations' ISAF troops reflects the will of their respective national legislatures, which in turn reflect the sentiments of the electorate. The inferences one could make from this are potentially staggering.
A lackluster military response from NATO and others has even entered into international politics. The Australian government has described the Western response as "underwhelming," and NATO commander General John Craddock said that the NATO alliance was "wavering" on Afghanistan (Guardian, Times). According to a leaked French memo, a British diplomat claimed that the Afghan mission is doomed.
Although many of those troops that are no longer needed in Iraq could potentially be redeployed to Afghanistan, and many of the US Marines who were no longer needed in now-stable Anbar already have been, this move comes relatively late in the game. Due to the limitations placed on various ISAF contingents, the coalition has had to rely heavily on air strikes during the last several years. In a counterinsurgency (COIN) environment, even precision air strikes tend to be too imprecise. This reliance on combat air has resulted in a growing number of civilian deaths, jeopardizing the previously strong cooperation and resolve of the Afghan people. According to the US Army/Marine Corps COIN Manual:
Any use of force generates a series of reactions. There may be times when an overwhelming effort is necessary to destroy or intimidate an opponent and reassure the populace. Extremist insurgent combatants often have to be killed. In any case, however, counterinsurgents should calculate carefully the type and amount of force to be applied and who wields it for any operation. An operation that kills five insurgents is counterproductive if collateral damage leads to the recruitment of fifty more insurgents.
These imperatives require a shift in tactics away from combat air, and toward the type of COIN approach that worked for coalition forces in places like Fallujah, Basra, and Baghdad. However, such a strategy can not be fully implemented when the bulk of the military force in Afghanistan is not allowed to provide security in the places where it is needed most. The current situation is a repetitive, degenerative cycle: security is limited by troop shortages in the areas of Afghanistan contested by the Taliban (mostly the Pashtun regions abutting the porous border with Pakistan), allowing the Taliban enough freedom of maneuver to carry out their operations, which further compromises security, resulting in further restrictions on combat troops. According to the COIN Manual:
In most COIN operations in which U.S. forces participate, insurgents hold a distinct advantage in their level of local knowledge. They speak the language, move easily within the society, and are more likely to understand the population’s interests. Thus, effective COIN operations require a greater emphasis on certain skills, such as language and cultural understanding, than does conventional warfare. The interconnected, politico-military nature of insurgency and COIN requires immersion in the people and their lives to achieve victory.
By deploying more troops within rural Afghan population centers in order to protect the people, collect intelligence, and unequivocally demonstrate the resolve and good intentions of the ISAF/Afghan government mandate, the coalition could deal a severe blow to to the Taliban and consolidate the force-on-force military victory of 2001/'02 with a COIN victory in 2010/'11. The most crucial limitation of ISAF in Afghanistan is that of trained, equipped, combat-capable troops to provide this security, and that shortage is the primary reason (and the contributor to many secondary reasons) for the Taliban resurgence in the last several years.
Because the coalition, and the Afghans by extension, appear on the surface to be losing against the Taliban, many in both Afghanistan and the world at large have encouraged a diplomatic dialogue with the Taliban in recent months. The Taliban, however, appear mostly uninterested in negotiating. A great deal was made of recent secret and/or informal meetings between Taliban-affiliated officials and elements of the Karzai government, as hosted by the Saudis (Wired, BBC, UPI, CNN). However, some analysts have pointed out that the Taliban officials (most notably the former Foreign Minister Wakil Mutawakkil) have no authority to negotiate on behalf of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and his lieutenants. President Hamid Karzai's recent immunity pledge to Mullah Omar in exchange for negotiations was immediately dismissed by the Taliban. A November column by RAND analyst Cheryl Benard explained why near term negotiations would be a fruitless endeavour.
[I]magine the actual substance of the negotiation. The Taliban are doing well and have no reason to abandon their aims. They want what they had before 2001: an extremist, eccentric Islamic state where the sports stadium is used for public executions of dissenters, homosexuals and women accused of adultery; religious police roam the streets with sticks to beat anyone whose beard or chador is too short; and all education for girls is eliminated.
What part of that are we planning to accommodate?
Besides, we've tried talking to the Taliban before -- throughout the 1990s, when they held power. They make no concessions.
Who can forget Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Mutawakkil's proposed "compromise" on the issue of public executions? If the international community was offended by the killings in the sports stadium, he suggested in a television interview, they should send money to build a separate execution facility. Mutawakkil, by the way, belongs to the Taliban's purported "moderate" faction.
For the same reason that negotiating with Iran has proved futile over the last several years, negotiations with the Taliban at present would be pointless because the Taliban would essentially approach negotiations from a position of strength. One group that understands this is Afghan women, a group of whom met with Karzai in October to decry any negotiations with the Taliban. Indications are that most Afghan citizens have no desire to return to Taliban rule - the apparent apathy of some results from their belief that NATO and the West lack the resolve to comprehensively defeat the Taliban. Unfortunately, the West has done less than it should to allay these fears.
Westerners, particularly Europeans and American liberals, prefer diplomatic engagement to military engagement - essentially, diplomacy for the sake of diplomacy. While diplomacy is undeniably effective under some circumstances, many tend to forget that diplomacy only works in one's favor when a nation or coalition has overwhelming military force - a lesson learned by the Japanese in World War II, when America's only term for preventing the impending invasion was Japan's unconditional surrender. In other words, talking only works when used as a preventative or alternative to the use of force - a prevention/alternative that the Taliban has never seemed especially concerned over. As military theorists from Sun Tzu to Machiavelli to von Clausewitz have all pointed out, diplomacy and war are two sides of the same coin, and negotiating with the Taliban right now would amount to negotiations of a surrender on the part of a free and democratic Afghan government, and the ISAF coalition.
Efforts against Taliban logistics have also been stymied by an unlikely source of opposition: Iran. The Iranian regime has a history of financing terrorist groups in an effort to disrupt the balance of power in neighboring or hostile nations: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the Jaish al Mahdi in Iraq, just to name a few. In a surprising turn of events, substantial evidence implicates Iran in supplying the Taliban with arms (AP, BBC, BBC, Reuters). A recent BBC radio interview with a Taliban fighter in western Pakistan noted the ability of imported Kalashnikov rifles to fire rifle grenades as proof that they were manufactured in Iran - Kalashnikovs manufactured in other nations lack this capability. Signs are also accumulating that indicate assistance for the Taliban from elements of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
There are several possible reasons why Iran might supply weapons to a group that it nearly went to war with. Iran might be attempting to keep Afghanistan unstable, in a bid to prevent another strong Sunni neighbor from rising up on its eastern border. A sort of "cold war" between Iran and its regional rival, Saudi Arabia, is well documented; and with Iran's support for the Jaish al Mahdi having failed to stop the stabilization of Iraq, the Iranian regime is faced with the potential for strong, opposition neighbors with strong Western ties on all sides. The Iranian government could also be motivated purely by its hatred of the West, taking cues from the Soviet Union in Vietnam and the United States in Afghanistan by supplying arms in a sort of proxy war against a more loathed enemy than the former enemy that it now supports. As Iran's border with Pakistan lies in the wild Balochistan region, interdicting such supply shipments as they pass into Taliban-controlled Pakistani territory will remain difficult.
An earlier quote from an article by Michael Yon noted the successful turbine delivery to the Kajaki Dam. Yon, one of the two best independent journalist working in today's theaters of war (the other being Michael Totten), has a truly outstanding dispatch describing the mission by a mostly British force. Missions such as these are evidence of real success in Afghanistan - the very type of successful COIN operations that will build critical infrastructure, which will in turn build trust among the Afghan people, which will in turn increase their cooperation with ISAF forces, which will increase security in contested areas, which will consolidate the Taliban's defeat. In COIN operations, not only does every action cause a reaction, many actions cause chain reactions, for better or for worse. The Kajaki Dam triumph is one operation that will, in theory at least, cause a chain reaction for the better. They key is generating enough simultaneous positive reactions and chain reactions to compliment it, thus turning pyrrhic victories into decisive ones.
The Kajaki Dam mission received a great deal of press once it had been completed. One of the success stories that continues to go underreported is that of the fight against Afghan opium cultivation. The opium and heroin trade has thrived in Afghanistan for decades, and the thriving drug trade was tolerated by the Taliban regime until mid-2001, when Mullah Omar denounced opium cultivation as "un-Islamic" and outlawed it - in order to inflate the value of Taliban opium stockpiles, according to some analysts. With the collapse of Taliban power in late 2001, Mullah Omar and his subordinates co-opted opium as a cash crop of convenience. The result was that opium became the Taliban's economic "center of gravity" - a military term originating from the works of Carl von Clausewitz that is used to refer to "those characteristics, capabilities, or locations from which a military force derives its freedom of action, physical strength, or will to fight." As goes the opium, so goes the Taliban.
Beyond the simple dilemma of denying opium profits to a cash hungry insurgent militia (and the additional issue of the international drug war), opium presents additional challenges to counterinsurgent forces. In a barren country like Afghanistan, opium is easy for subsistence farmers to grow and sell for enough cash to keep their families alive for one more year. In addition, the Taliban pressures Afghan farmers to grow opium with threats of violence if they fail to comply. To simply destroy the opium fields in ways similar to the defoliation of the jungles of Vietnam would compromise both the economic and physical security of the Afghan people, alienating the very citizens that the Afghan government must support in order to build legitimacy. Although some have suggested refocusing the Afghan opium trade for pharmaceutical purposes, many believe that the Afghan government lacks the resources to police the opium fields, leaving the potential for legalized poppy fields to continue financing the Taliban. As a result, the opium conundrum has haunted ISAF and the Afghans for years.
Despite a bumper opium crop this year, Afghan opium cultivation has actually declined considerably in 2008 (BBC, BBC, AP, Times). Beyond the coalition information operations, several items have contributed to this decline. One of these has been the rise in Afghan cultivation of a trendy fruit: pomegranates (Guardian, AP).
Last year, Afghanistan exported its first pomegranates to outlets of the French chain Carrefour in Dubai. The fruit, larger and redder than many pomegranates imported from Turkey or North Africa, was a hit. Carrefour quickly placed orders for all its Middle East stores, according to U.S. funders and Afghan officials.
"They found out that [pomegranate] from Afghanistan is probably the best tasting. It's sweet; it's juicy," Afghanistan Agriculture Minister Mohammad Asif Rahimi said at the launch ceremony at a Kabul hotel Wednesday.
Another unlikely contributor to the fall of Afghan opium crops is high fuel prices. Although the world has seen recent relief from the collapse of petroleum prices, previously skyrocketing fuel prices led to a wholesale increase in food prices worldwide. Food price increases have led Afghan farmers to swap opium for wheat, both for subsistence and as a cash crop (Guardian, AP). It will take time before the world will see what impact this will have on the Taliban, but conventional wisdom indicates that as the Afghan opium supplies wither, so too will the Taliban's cash flow.
In addition, several small but important victories have resulted from the concerted efforts of the handful of nations that are holding the line in Afghanistan. In recent months, fewer foreign insurgents have entered Afghanistan due to better efforts to shore up the porous border with Pakistan. Afghanistan is beginning to function on a regional level, evidenced by the Afghan government's efforts with Iran to set up a joint transportation venture. And, in signs that the Afghan government is coming into its own on the international stage, Afghanistan bested Syria by securing a contested seat on the IAEA board.
The Iraq War has taught better than any other recent event that international media outlets have a vested interest in reporting bad news. Despite instances of bad news coming out of Afghanistan at this moment in time, the Afghan central government, the Afghan security forces, and the ISAF coalition continue to make progress. According to the aformentioned Michael Yon:
[L]et me stipulate that it’s still a real fight. While the AOGs (armed opposition groups) are making progress on some fronts, success is no more assured for them than for us. Mostly they destroy things that their countrymen want — including peace and the prospect of increased prosperity. They cut off lips and noses and douse women with gasoline and burn them alive. Just recently, a group of enemies apparently tried to bait us into killing a wedding party. If we are going to get groups to the negotiating table, we must pose a credible threat against enemies and a credible promise to the rest. What we don’t want is the current situation, where it’s actually the AOGs that are forcing us to the table, largely due to NATO’s general apathy and unwillingness to fight.
The fight in Afghanistan - a fight for freedom and safety, and against terrorism - is still a fight that the Afghans and ISAF can win. It will take a continued commitment, and a concerted effort at implementing counterinsurgent doctrine, but the Afghans want the Taliban defeated - they have no desire to return to lives supervised by extremist Taliban thugs. Whether one's motivation is global security, human rights, or humanitarianism, civilized nations should do everything in their power to shore up support for this critical international endeavour.
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