[Texgreen] Afghanistan: Why NATO cannot win

[Roger Baker]

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[This strikes me as a pretty good analysis of why the Bushies and  
their remaining allies at the UN are losing in Afghanistan as well as  
Iraq. The common mistake was to confuse our sheer (if declining)  
military strength with skill in working in harmony with Afghan (or  
Iraqi) goals and culture. If we are not REALLY there to benefit  
Afghanistan, their public can see our real intentions and will try to  
eject us just like the Soviets. -- Roger].


"... the central issue is that the US has simply failed to come up  
with a winning political and military strategy in Afghanistan..."



<http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HI30Df01.html>

Afghanistan: Why NATO cannot win
By M K Bhadrakumar

The four-month-old Republic of Montenegro on the Adriatic Sea  
received its first foreign dignitary on Monday when US Secretary of  
Defense Donald Rumsfeld arrived at its capital, Podgorica.  
Unknowingly, the tiny country of rugged mountains and great beauty in  
the Balkans with a population of 630,000 was being catapulted into  
the cockpit of 21st-century geopolitics.

Rumsfeld's mission was to request the inexperienced leadership in  
Podgorica to dispatch a military contingent to form part of the
coalition of the willing in the "war on terror". Rumsfeld promised  
that in return, the US would help train Montenegro's fledgling army  
to standards of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

However, Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic could not make any  
commitments. Rumsfeld's proposal came at an awkward moment for the  
leadership in Podgorica, which had just scrapped the draft and was  
scaling down its 4,000-strong army to about 2,500.

This bizarre diplomatic exchange between the most awesome military  
power on Earth and the newest member of the "international community"  
brings home the paradoxes of the "war on terror" on the eve of its  
fifth anniversary. Three ministerial-level meetings of NATO have  
taken place within the space of the past month alone, specifically  
with the intent of ascertaining how troop strength in Afghanistan can  
be augmented.

US Marine Corps General James Jones, NATO's supreme commander of  
operations, has admitted that the fierce resistance put up by the  
Taliban and the burgeoning insurgency has taken the alliance by  
surprise. NATO forces have realized that an all-out war is at hand,  
rather than the peacekeeping mission that was imagined earlier. New  
rules of engagement have been accordingly drawn up for NATO  
contingents deployed in the southern provinces of Afghanistan - and  
soon to be extended to the whole country, where US soldiers are  
reportedly to be put under NATO control.

British commanders in southern Afghanistan have been given clearance  
to use the army's controversial Hydra rockets, which can target large  
concentrations of people with tungsten darts. The commanders are also  
permitted to resort to air strikes on suspected Taliban formations,  
conduct preemptive strikes and set up ambushes. Yet a British  
commander has been reported as telling the media, "The intensity and  
ferocity of the fighting is far greater than in Iraq on a daily basis."

The fatality rate of the 18,500-strong NATO force averages about five  
per week, which is roughly equal to the losses suffered by the  
Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Indeed, in withering comments to  
The Sunday Telegraph newspaper last weekend, Soviet commanders who  
oversaw Moscow's disastrous campaign have predicted that the NATO  
forces will ultimately be forced to flee from Afghanistan.

General Boris Gromov, the charismatic Soviet commander who supervised  
the withdrawal in 1989, warned, "The Afghan resistance is, in my  
opinion, growing. Such behavior on the part of the intractable  
Afghans is to my mind understandable. It is conditioned by centuries  
of tradition, geography, climate and religion.

"We saw over a period of many years how the country was torn apart by  
civil war ... But in the face of outside aggressions, Afghans have  
always put aside their differences and united. Evidently, the [US- 
led] coalition forces are also being seen as a threat to the nation."

A comparison with the 1980s is in order. The 100,000-strong Soviet  
army operated alongside a full-fledged Afghan army of equal strength  
with an officer corps trained in the elite Soviet military academies,  
and backed by aviation, armored vehicles and artillery, with all the  
advantages of a functioning, politically motivated government in  
Kabul. And yet it proved no match for the Afghan resistance.

In comparison, there are about 20,000 US troops in Afghanistan, plus  
roughly the same number of troops belonging to NATO contingents,  
which includes 5,400 troops from Britain, 2,500 from Canada and 2,300  
from the Netherlands. Nominally, there is a 42,000-strong Afghan  
National Army, but it suffers from a high rate of defection.

General Jones has asked for 2,500 additional NATO troops. But the  
major NATO countries - Turkey, France, Germany, Spain and Italy -  
have declined to send more. In actuality, it is questionable whether  
2,500 more troops would make any significant difference in a country  
of the size of Afghanistan and with such a difficult terrain.

Distinguished British soldier-politician Sir Cyril Townsend wrote in  
Al-Hayat newspaper this week, "A realistic military appreciation of  
the situation would be that to gain the upper hand against the  
Taliban and al-Qaeda, and to start winning over the southeast of the  
country, will require deployment of at least 10,000 extra, highly  
trained professional and well-equipped troops with matching air  
support."

Clearly, a huge crisis is shaping up for NATO. Its credibility is at  
stake. Sir Cyril does not foresee that the alliance will come up with  
the required military resources "to beat the Taliban on its own  
ground". No wonder Lieutenant-General David Richards, commander of  
NATO forces in Afghanistan and former assistant chief of the general  
staff of the British army, ominously warned in a recent television  
interview, "We need to realize we could actually fail here."

Most observers have pointed a finger at the developing crisis in  
Afghanistan almost exclusively in terms of the shortfalls in  
achieving a rapid, high-tech military victory over the Taliban. In  
the ensuing blame game, there is the recurrent criticism that  
Washington did not commit enough forces.

Some say that the Iraq war turned out to be an unfortunate  
distraction for the US administration from wrapping up and following  
up on the ouster of the Taliban regime in 2001. Others put the blame  
on the European member countries of NATO - that the Europeans are far  
too timid and self-centered to fight wars in faraway lands, even if  
it is for their ultimate good.

Widening somewhat the gyre of the blame game, almost everyone  
acknowledges that opium is eating away the vitals of the Afghan state  
as counter-drug operations have been a dismal failure.

And, of course, there is the perennial accusation that US regional  
policy during the administration of George W Bush has been on the  
whole negligent about "nation-building" and that Washington has been  
tardy in earmarking enough material and financial resources for  
Afghanistan's reconstruction (in comparison with East Timor or Bosnia- 
Herzegovina).

All such criticism may contain elements of truth. But germane to the  
crisis in a fundamental sense is the hard reality that no matter the  
oft-repeated factor of a reasonably secure cross-border sanctuary in  
Pakistan, the Taliban have indeed staged a comeback in essence as an  
indigenous guerilla force capable of waging a long-term struggle.  
That is to say, the central issue is that the US has simply failed to  
come up with a winning political and military strategy in Afghanistan.

Comparison has been drawn with the successful peacekeeping operations  
in the Balkans. General Wesley Clark, former supreme commander of  
NATO, wrote in Newsweek magazine recently, "In order to succeed, we  
must adopt some of the lessons and practices we put in place so  
painfully in the Balkans. We must acknowledge the magnitude of the  
task and pull in the full authority of the international community.  
NATO can do much more than just supply troops. We need to acknowledge  
that, yes, we do nation-building."

But again, the Afghan problem is vastly dissimilar from the  
dismemberment of Yugoslavia. First and foremost, there is the highly  
contrived nature of the US intervention in Afghanistan. In the  
immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, in  
an international environment where "we are all Americans", as Le  
Monde famously wrote, no one asked any hard questions as to whether  
Washington's decision to attack Afghanistan was justified or not. The  
international community simply acquiesced.

But the fact remains that Washington, indeed, had the option to forgo  
direct intervention and instead to extend its decisive political,  
diplomatic and military support to the anti-Taliban Afghan groups  
that, under the compulsions arising out of the assassination of the  
Northern Alliance's Ahmad Shah Masoud, were finally rallying under  
the leadership of former king Zahir Shah and were just about ready by  
late September 2001 to announce the establishment of an Afghan  
government-in-exile.

The Afghan king himself was persuaded at long last to give up his  
reticence about returning to active politics after three decades of  
exile in Rome. That option, had it been pursued, would have opened  
the way for a quintessentially "Afghan solution" to the challenge  
posed by the Taliban regime - a solution that would have enjoyed the  
full sanctity of Afghan traditions and culture.

But the Bush administration deliberately chose not to take that  
option. Conceivably, Washington decided that only a spectacular  
military operation would assuage the US public, which was traumatized  
by the September 11 attacks, and highlight the decisive leadership in  
the White House in safeguarding national security.

Arguably, Afghanistan would also have been viewed by the Bush  
administration as a laboratory where Washington could test its  
doctrines of preemptive military strike, the "coalition of the  
willing", unilateralism, etc - doctrines that provided the political  
underpinning for the subsequent invasion of Iraq. Or, in the medium  
and long term, Washington estimated that short of a military presence  
inside Afghanistan and without a client regime installed in Kabul,  
the US would be unable to ease other regional powers from the Afghan  
chessboard and reorder the geopolitics of the region as part of its  
global strategy.

At any rate, the stratagem aimed at exploiting the Afghan problem to  
seize geopolitical advantages was not so apparent at the beginning.  
But it didn't take long before it became clear that the US agenda was  
to exploit the "war on terror" for establishing a client state in  
Afghanistan, and for gaining a sought-after military presence in  
Central Asia. And in the event, the US military presence  
incrementally paved the way for creating a base for NATO in the region.

There was a high degree of sophistry in the US military operations in  
October 2001 as well. In the initial stages, an impression was  
created deliberately that the US intervention would be confined to  
air operations and the induction of a limited number of special  
forces specifically for the purpose of advising and guiding the  
Northern Alliance militia.

Thus the Northern Alliance furiously protested when it first came to  
be know of the sudden arrival of US ground troops at Bagram airport  
in early November 2001, in the wake of the overthrow of the Taliban  
government.

Washington also gave different impressions to different interlocutors  
in the region regarding the nature of the post-Taliban regime it had  
in mind. Certainly, the mostly non-Pashtun Northern Alliance  
leadership was led to believe that the overthrow of the Taliban would  
automatically result in its return to the seat of power in Kabul from  
where it was evicted by the Taliban in 1996.

Conceivably, regional powers such as Russia, Iran and India, too,  
were persuaded to fancy that such an outcome was in the cards and  
that the transfer of power in Kabul to the Northern Alliance  
leadership would ultimately work to their advantage, given their past  
material, financial, political and diplomatic backing of the alliance  
as the spearhead of the anti-Taliban resistance during the period  
1996-2001.

On the other hand, Islamabad was given assurances by Washington that  
a Pashtun-majority government in Kabul was in the making and that  
incrementally there would be a political accommodation of erstwhile  
Taliban elements in the emergent power structure. Islamabad no doubt  
sought and gained an assurance from Washington that under no  
circumstances would the Northern Alliance be allowed to grab power in  
Kabul in the post-Taliban phase.

All this while, Washington seemed to have had Abdul Haq, the famous  
mujahideen leader with long-standing links with US intelligence, as  
its first choice to assume the leadership in Kabul after the  
overthrow of the Taliban.

But in the event, Haq was assassinated by the Taliban, most likely  
with the connivance of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, which  
got wind of Washington's hidden agenda and feared that Haq wouldn't  
be amenable to Islamabad's persuasions once he was ensconced in power  
in Kabul.

Meanwhile, the Northern Alliance outwitted its US mentors. Contrary  
to the tacit understanding between alliance commanders and their  
American mentors to the effect that after the Taliban's ouster Kabul  
would initially remain a neutral city under United Nations control,  
the alliance militia occupied the capital and its leadership  
unilaterally installed itself in power. These leaders hoped  
(optimistically, as it turned out) that the US would have little  
choice but to accept the fait accompli.

Thus when the Bonn conference got under way in December 2001,  
Washington had a two-point agenda, namely to project a credible  
substitute for the late Haq as the leader of the new setup and,  
second, to do some arm-twisting to cajole the Northern Alliance to  
give up its leadership role in Kabul.

Nonetheless, when the US brought up Hamid Karzai's name in Bonn,  
there was widespread opposition by Afghan groups. In the perceptions  
of the Afghan participants at the Bonn conference, Karzai simply  
didn't have enough standing as a political leader in the Afghan  
scene, having sat in exile in the US for the past several years, and  
being at a serious disadvantage insofar as he did not belong to a  
major Pashtun tribe.

But the United States pressed ahead regardless with Karzai's name,  
given his closeness to the US establishment and his total dependence  
on US support. The US brought immense pressure to bear on Afghan  
groups present at Bonn to accept Karzai's leadership. It was with  
extreme reluctance that the Northern Alliance leader, president  
Burhanuddin Rabbani, finally handed over the levers of power to Karzai.

While abdicating from power in Kabul in early 2002, Rabbani said he  
hoped that it was the last time the proud Afghan people would be  
bullied by foreigners. Anyone familiar with Afghan ethos and  
character could foresee at that juncture that Karzai would find it  
next to impossible to consolidate his grip on power, let alone  
establish his authority over the entire country. Indeed, that is  
exactly what has happened over the past five years.

The repeated and brazen manipulations by the US during the past five  
years, especially during the parliamentary and presidential elections  
in Afghanistan held under election rules that were tailor-made for  
predictable results, failed to ensure that Karzai commanded respect  
in the Afghan bazaar.

US attempts to consolidate a Pashtun power base for Karzai have  
virtually failed. Equally, the episodic attempts to create dissension  
within the Taliban have also not worked. In turn, these failures led  
to large-scale Pashtun alienation. US efforts to marginalize the  
Northern Alliance and to enlarge the ethnic-Pashtun representation in  
Karzai's cabinet have not had the desired effect of meaningfully  
tackling Pashtun alienation, either. Arguably, they may have created  
latent resentment among Northern Alliance leaders, which lies below  
the surface for the time being.

In other words, there is a fundamental issue of the legitimacy of  
state power that remains unresolved in Afghanistan. At a minimum, in  
these past five years there should have been an intra-Afghan dialogue  
that included the Taliban. This initiative could have been under UN  
auspices on a parallel track.

The inability to earn respect and command authority plus the heavy  
visible dependence on day-to-day US support have rendered the Kabul  
setup ineffective. Alongside this, the Afghan malaise of nepotism,  
tribal affiliations and corruption has also led to bad governance. It  
is in this combination of circumstances that the Taliban have  
succeeded in staging a comeback.

What lies ahead is, therefore, becoming extremely difficult to  
predict. Even with 2,500 additional troops it is highly doubtful  
whether NATO can succeed in defeating the Taliban. For one thing, the  
Taliban enjoy grassroots support within Afghanistan. There is no  
denying this ground reality.

Second, the Taliban are becoming synonymous with Afghan resistance.  
The mindless violations of the Afghan code of honor by the coalition  
forces during their search-and-destroy missions and the excessive use  
of force during military operations leading to loss of innocent lives  
have provoked widespread revulsion among Afghan people.

Karzai's inability to do anything about the coalition forces'  
arbitrary behavior is only adding to his image of a weak leader and  
is deepening his overall loss of authority in the perceptions of the  
Afghan people, apart from strengthening the raison d'etre of the  
Afghan resistance.

Third, it is a matter of time, if the threshold of the Taliban  
resurgence goes unchecked, before the non-Pashtun groups in the  
eastern, northern and western regions also begin to organize  
themselves. There are disturbing signs pointing in this direction  
already. If that were to happen, NATO forces might well find  
themselves in the unenviable situation of getting caught in the  
crossfire between various warring ethnic groups.

Fourth, at a certain point it becomes unavoidable that regional  
powers will get drawn into the strife. The fact remains that all  
Afghan ethnic groups enjoy a contiguous presence across the borders  
in neighboring countries. There is considerable misgiving among  
regional powers already over Washington's hidden long-term agenda to  
bring Afghanistan, which has been historically a neutral country,  
under the NATO flag.

No amount of pious homilies about NATO's role and objectives can  
obfuscate the geopolitical implications of the Western alliance's  
occupation of a strategically important country far away from the  
European continent, which lies at the crossroads of vast regions that  
are becoming the battleground for global influence.

Without doubt, in the perceptions of regional powers, NATO's defeat  
in Afghanistan can only mean the scattering of the US blueprint of  
domination of Central Asia, South Asia and the Persian Gulf.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, stated  
in testimony at the House International Relations Committee of the US  
Congress in Washington last week: "Foreign pressures are making  
Afghanistan the turf for proxy wars. The country is being  
destabilized by an inflow of insurgents and weapons and money and  
intelligence. There is collusion from neighboring countries, and this  
is a problem in itself."

M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign  
Service for more than 29 years, with postings including ambassador to  
Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey (1998-2001).

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please  
contact us about sales, syndication and republishing .)


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